Abstract tattoo of overlapping black circles, red and orange shapes and scattered dots on a person's upper back, near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Abstract circles and shapes on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo covers much of the upper back and is built from overlapping black circles, angular shapes and loose lines. Red, orange and pink fills and sketchy red outlines sit behind the black linework, with small dots and splatter-like marks scattered around the edges. The composition is asymmetric and centred on the shoulder blade, and the background is dark.

Back Circle Abstract shape Dot Splatter Line Geometric shape

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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 sports hall still smelled of floor polish and oranges, and somebody had pinned our old Year Eleven photographs to a board by the fire doors. I found Dev Sandhu in the third row, all elbows, a paint-spattered smock buttoned up to his chin. He was the one who started the circles.

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Mr Ferrier had given us one afternoon, a tin of red, a tin of black and an instruction to make something we could not explain. Dev drew rings with a jam jar lid and a compass he had nicked from maths, overlapping them until the page looked like a bubble gone wrong. I flicked orange across it with an old toothbrush. When Ferrier came in he said nothing for a full minute, then pinned it crooked above the kiln.

'You kept the sheet,' Dev said, appearing at my elbow with a plastic cup of something amber. He told me the school had knocked the art block down in 2009 and the paintings had gone into a skip with the rest. I said I had it, actually, folded in the lining of my old satchel. We both laughed at how absurd it was that we had each kept the thing that got us a detention.

He asked if I'd show him. I unfolded it on a trestle table between the sausage rolls and the squash. The red had gone the colour of rust, and the rings still sat on top of one another, refusing to agree about where the centre was. 'Still crooked,' he said. 'Still ours.'