Placement · placement_wrist
Wrist
0 attested · 1 promoted3 sources · T1
What the research says
placement_anatomy- Category
- extremity
- Available area
- “The smallest areas on the body are best for simple designs made of basic shapes.” The chart lists the wrist first in that band.
- Joint behavior
- A joint, and encircling work here is Tier 1 attested - the dockyard record describes the rope as placed around the wrist. What the crossing does to the design is not described by any fetched source.
- Scale behavior
- Small in the cited chart; the same page gives “a thin piece of script is tiny, and will look great on the wrist” as its worked example.
- Wrap direction
- Encircling is the attested arrangement for at least one motif: “Usually placed around the wrist”
- Conflicts or cautions
- The cited chart uses the wrist as its example of a design that cannot be shrunk to fit: “if a client has a photo of roses side by side on a piece of paper that they want tattooed on their inner wrist, you would have to explain that having roses side-by-side like that would wrap around their wrist…and that all the little details wouldn’t fit on such a small area of the body”
Provenance
3 resolvedRoyal Museums Greenwich
National Maritime Museum page. Verbatim: the word 'tattoo' is "derived from the Tahitian word 'tatau', meaning to mark"; a pig and a rooster tattooed on the feet were "said to protect a seaman from drowning"; a full-rigged ship, an anchor, a dragon and a shellback turtle each record a specific voyage or crossing. Establishes protective (apotropaic) intent inside the tattoo domain.
museum · retrieved 2026-08-28
The Historic Dockyard Chatham
Maritime heritage museum article on naval tattoo designs. Verbatim: records show designs that are "marks of love, loss and life events" while others demonstrate "national identities, religious faith, and patriotic pride"; "Each swallow represents 5,000 nautical miles in a sailor's career." One of the few tier 1 sources that speaks about tattoo subject matter as lived human experience rather than as art history.
museum · retrieved 2026-08-28
Tattooing 101
Professional tattoo-education page and the primary placement source for this batch. It is the only fetched source that bands EVERY body area by the size of work it holds - small, medium, large and extra-large - which is what makes the available_area and scale_behavior columns answerable at all. It also supplies the fit rule (“a forearm tattoo shouldn’t wrap so far around the arm that it overlaps”), the design-expansion warning, and two orientation rules. IMPORTANT NEGATIVE FINDING, recorded because it bears directly on what this corpus may claim: the page states “Tattoo placements don’t have any specific meaning tied to them.” That is a Tier 2 trade claim about the modern Western commercial context in which the page is written. IT DOES NOT AND CANNOT SETTLE whether placement carries meaning or restriction in any cultural tradition - two Tier 1 museum sources in this same batch record placements that do. The claim is recorded, scoped, and NOT used to suppress a cultural placement rule anywhere in the corpus.
professional tattoo source · retrieved 2026-08-30
Related concepts
1 linkAssociated with · 1
- strength unstatedpromoted · not an independent attestationresearched
Promoted from motifs_seed.placement_behaviors of motif_rope ('wrist') [class EP]. PLACEMENT AXIS. Typed associated_with, not placement_supports: the packs use placement_supports only as placement -> composition (doc 01 'forearm -> placement_supports -> vertical_composition'; specimen rel_0004), and model motif -> placement as 'anatomy_fit', which is not in the locked 14. The placement_ target prefix carries the axis. The cited source states this placement. Provenance inherited from the parent row(s): source_historic_dockyard_tattoos; source_tattooing101_draw_traditional; the first is carried in source_id. No new fact: this edge restates a value already present in the corpus.