A tattooist applies black tribal blackwork linework to a bare arm, holding a tool above a small ink cap.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal tattoo being applied to an arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A tattooist is working on a bare arm, using a hand-held tool to add black linework to a bold tribal-style design. The linework is heavy and swirling, with solid black areas and some finer detail along the edges. The image is mostly warm skin tones with a dark blue fabric in the background and a small ink cap held in the artist's other hand.

Blackwork Upper arm Tribal Hand Arm

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

Dessie had been told the ink would settle in a week, but the lines were still wet and glossy when the lift stopped on the fourteenth floor again and the doors groaned open onto the smell of bleach and somebody's Sunday chips. He carried the kit in a biscuit tin. Inside were two caps, a roll of cling film, a pot of Vaseline, and the spare needle his brother had bent straight with pliers.

Keep reading

Flat 14C belonged to Mrs Okonkwo's sister, who had moved to Croydon and left the key with the caretaker. Nobody on the estate knew what she had been doing in the front room for thirty years, only that the curtains stayed shut and the radio played Radio Two at a volume you could hear from the stairwell. Dessie had learned the patterns from the drawings pinned above her sofa, swirling black bands that broke into solid shapes like waves hitting rock.

He worked slowly, one hand flat on the skin, the other on the tool, watching the edge of each curl. Mrs Okonkwo's sister had left him a single instruction written on the back of a gas bill: fill the spaces last, because the spaces are where the old ones sit.

Near dawn he sat back and reached for the cap. The ink had gone thick and dark in the bottom of it, like a lake that has forgotten the sky. He pressed one last line along the edge and the design closed. Down the shaft the lift started up again, humming, and he realised he had been holding his breath the whole time.