Black and grey abstract brush stroke tattoo across a person's upper back, with a sweeping curved line and a vertical stroke, set against green foliage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Abstract brush strokes across upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a bare upper back with a large abstract tattoo made of dark brush-like marks. A curved horizontal stroke sweeps from the left shoulder area towards the right, crossed by a bold vertical stroke with fine tapering edges and a small dot below. The ink is black and grey with soft fading in the strokes, set against blurred green foliage with orange blossoms.

Back Brush stroke Back

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

Somewhere south of the Cape the ink froze in its dish, so Hiroshi Tanabe sat on an upturned bucket and breathed on the stone until it softened. The Marigold Trader rolled like a drunk on the swell, and he swore at it in two languages, neither of them polite.

Keep reading

I was twenty and the only deckhand who had asked to learn. He gave me a brush of horsehair set in bamboo and told me a stroke was a single breath, not something you built. 'Start heavy,' he said, 'let the paper take the weight. Then lighten. Then stop before you think about stopping.' My first attempts looked as if someone had dragged a wet mop across the page. He laughed until he coughed.

The longest stroke we painted together was on the last night before Kobe, when the sea went flat as a plate and the sky was the colour of pewter. He drew a long curve from the rail toward the horizon, and I answered it with one upright line, the way the mainmast cut the sky. Where the brush lifted, the ink broke into fine grey threads, and he would not let me wipe them away.

In the morning his tin sat open on the galley table and his bunk was bare. I took the sheet to the stern and held it up against the wake. At the foot of my upright line a single dot had bled into the paper, the way he always finished. I let the wind have the sheet. The water had the rest of the line.