Black tribal tattoo with a central swirl and tapering spikes across the upper arm of a person in a white vest top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal swirl tattoo on an upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black tribal design with a central spiral and long, tapering spikes runs down the outer upper arm, ending in a thin curled point near the elbow. The lines are solid black with some soft grey variation in the ink. The arm fills the left and centre of the frame, with a white vest top and a brick wall behind.

Blackwork Upper arm Tribal Swirl Spike Abstract

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The kite had come down in the dunes twice before the vicar's nephew got it into the air, and by then the wedding party had given up on photographs and gathered along the sea wall in their good shoes. Maud held the spool because her father had taught her to hold string without letting it burn her palms, and because nobody else would stand that close to the sand. Black against a white sky, the kite was something Ruth had cut from an old umbrella and painted by lamplight: a spiral at its heart, spikes flaring out like the rays of a sea urchin, and a tail that went on and on, knotted with strips of ribbon in the bride's colours.

Keep reading

"Let it out," said Tom, who had built it. Maud let out a yard, then another. The wind came round off the water and the kite lifted, dipped, lifted again, and for a moment the whole long tail lay straight across the bay like a line drawn with a fine pen. Ruth's mother said it looked like a comet. Ruth said it looked like a fish that had forgotten how to swim. They argued for as long as it took the kite to climb past the church spire.

Then the string went slack. Maud felt it in her fingers before she saw it, a lightness, and she reeled in fast, hand over hand, while the spool sang. The tail came back to her in a loop of wet ribbon, and the spikes folded like a closing hand. Nobody had cut it. The knot had simply let go where Tom had tied it in the dark the night before.

Ruth laughed, took the spool from her, and tied the string round the post of the sea wall twice, with a knot she said her grandfather had used on lobster pots. "Leave it," she said. "It'll find its own way down." They walked back up the lane to the hall with the kite lying in the grass behind them, its curled tail pointing at the place where the sea had been.