Black tribal swirl tattoo with grey shading across the upper arm and shoulder.

Tribal swirl tattoo on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tribal-style design of bold black swirls and tapering flame-like shapes covers the upper arm and reaches toward the shoulder. The solid black linework is surrounded by grey shading on the skin, which gives the pattern depth and a slightly raised look. The image is in black and grey with no colour ink, and the design fills most of the frame against a dark background.

Blackwork Upper arm Shoulder Swirl Spiral Flame Abstract pattern Arm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Penhallow swept the black weed from her back step every September, the way her mother had, and carried it down to the harbour wall in a bucket. Nobody in Porthcarrow had ever told her why, and she had never thought to ask.

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That autumn the lodger in the attic room was a fisherman's son called Tobias Rowe, who paid his fortnight in coins that smelt of brine. He stood under the carved lintel one evening and asked what the swirls were. She told him they were the sea turning back on itself, and that a house which bore them would never be taken by a flood. He laughed at that, and then he didn't.

That night the wind came round to the north and the tide climbed past the harbour wall. Mrs Penhallow stood at the landing window with a lamp and counted the crests of white foam curling inward, spiral after spiral, until the sky went grey. She did not sleep.

In the morning the water had gone back to its bed and the boarding house stood dry. The lintel had been half washed away, the flames of the carving pointing the wrong way. Tobias was already up the ladder with a chisel, cutting the curls deeper so the shapes ran with the tide and not against it. "The sea doesn't read carvings," he said, blowing dust from the grooves. "It only follows them." She set the bucket down on the step and left the weed where it lay.