Abstract black ink splatter tattoo across a man's shoulder blade and upper arm, with a red flower shape on his upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Abstract ink splatter across shoulder and back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A person's bare back and shoulder show an abstract tattoo of loose black brushstrokes, splashes and drips that sweep over the shoulder blade and onto the upper arm. A solid black band with a thin white cross-shaped gap sits on the upper arm, and a red flower or splash shape appears at the left of the upper back. The background is black and white, so the red ink stands out sharply against the grey skin tones.

Back Shoulder Upper arm Abstract Ink splatter Brushstroke Flower Band Drip

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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

Sit by the window where the light is, love, and mind the damp patch, it has opinions of its own. You'll want to hear about the night the ink went over, because the Rattray brothers never told it straight and Mabel only told it when she'd had a sherry. Leonard was the sign-writer in this town. He lettered the names on the lifeboats and the chandlers' boards, and he kept his big black pot of sign ink on the back room sill, where the gulls couldn't reach it.

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That October a gale came off the water and lifted the shutter clean off its hinge. Leonard was painting a small red poppy on a tin for Mabel's birthday, and the wind knocked the pot straight over. The ink ran across the floorboards, up the skirting, over the sill, and onto the sleeve of his good coat hanging on the door. Mabel laughed until she had to sit down. Then the gusts came through the broken frame and flung the black in long arcs across the wallpaper and the glass, spattering the lamp shade and the bedsheets in great wet ribbons.

Leonard didn't reach for a rag. He stood in the doorway with his brush and let the wind finish the painting, flicking the drips with the bristles and sweeping the splashes wider, until the whole room looked like weather. Where the sash had been taped he left a black band, and where the light fell through the glazing bars he left a white cross. When the storm dropped in the morning, the poppy was the only colour left in the room, sitting at the edge of all that black like it had been invited.

People pay good money to come and look at that room now, though it's been papered over twice. I charge them nothing. I just tell them the wind did it, and that Leonard had the sense to let it.