A woman seen from behind wears a black tank top and shows a black and grey back tattoo of vertical bands and script-like marks, with a tattoo on her upper arm.

Back tattoo of bands and script marks

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her dark hair tied up is photographed from behind, showing a large tattoo across her upper back. The design combines vertical bands of patterned lines with rows of script-like marks and blocks of fine text-like detail. The ink is black and grey, and the tattoo sits against a softly blurred outdoor background.

Back Upper arm Back piece Script Pattern Tribal pattern

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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 close, child, and mind the fire, for this tale is longer than the wood we have. In the year the Tidewater Line sank its last bridge, a ferrywoman named Ysolde Brack kept her accounts on her own back, since paper had gone to pulp in the damp. Each morning her sister stitched fresh bands onto her, tall columns of ruled lines, one for every crossing, and between them the small close script the old schoolmasters used, the kind you need a glass to read.

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The people on the far bank called it the ledger coat. A boy named Tam Orrin came down to the slipway one winter with a cart of lamp oil and a question he had carried since his mother went under the ice. He asked Ysolde whether the lines counted the living or the drowned. She told him to climb in the boat and find out. The current ran black and quick, and she worked the oars while he read aloud the blocks of fine text, name after name, and each name she passed over the water felt lighter in the boat than the last.

They rowed until the pylons showed, rusted and bearded with weed. Tam read until his voice cracked, and Ysolde took the names as if she were paying them out for coin. When the last block was spent she turned the boat for home, and the bands on her back were paler by one column. She laughed and said the river had taken its fare.

So when you ask me whether the ink is a curse or a debt, I say it is a ledger that balances only when someone reads it aloud. Now hush, pass me the bread, and I will tell you about the pylon that still sings in the wind.