Black fine line abstract tattoo across a bare upper back, with circles, swirls, a solid dot and italic lettering along curved lines.

Abstract linework and lettering on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bare upper back shows an abstract tattoo made of thin and medium black lines, including a large open circle, a solid dot, curling swirls and a long curved line that ends in small blocks. Short italic lettering runs alongside two of the curved lines, and the words are not easy to read at this size. The ink is black on skin with plain, dark background behind the subject.

Fine line Back Circle Swirl Dot Line Lettering Abstract Cross

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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 cage stops twelve hundred feet down and the bell in the winding house goes quiet, and you are standing at the top of the lamp room with your mother's shawl pulled tight, counting. Forty men on the night shift. You know the count the way you know the hymns, by feel, one name for each breath.

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Your father's name is the sixth, and the sixth is the one that does not come up. Mrs Hobday next door is saying something about the pit pony in a voice that goes thin at the edges. You look up instead, because the sky over the spoil heap has gone strange: a pale ring hanging above the wheel, a dark bead of a moon beside it, and a streak of light falling slow as a dropped spoon past the chimney stacks.

Your uncle once told you that a falling star is only a rock burning on its way somewhere it was never meant to go. He kept a slate in his waistcoat with a word scratched on it, SPLENDIDA, half rubbed away by his thumb, and claimed it was the name of the ship his grandfather sailed before the pits took the family. You never believed him. You do now, a little, because the streak above the chimneys ends in small blocks of light, like coal trucks coupling one by one.

The cage shudders, then rises. Six men step out black-faced and blinking, and your father is last, carrying his lamp like a candle in church. He looks up too. Neither of you mentions the sky. When he reaches the gate you take the slate from his coat and read the scratched word aloud, badly, and he laughs so hard he has to sit down on the wet step.