Side-by-side photos of a back: on the left a healed scar down the spine, on the right a black and grey scrollwork tattoo running the length of the spine.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey scrollwork down the spine

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Two photographs of a bare back are shown side by side. The left image shows a pale, healed scar running straight down the spine with no tattoo, while the right image shows a black and grey tattoo of ornamental scrollwork with leaf and feather-like motifs stacked along the spine. The tattoo uses soft shading and fine linework, and the person wears a black top in the right-hand photo.

Botanical Back Scrollwork Floral Leaves Feather Ornament Scar Spine

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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

Mind the puddle by the fish stall, love, and pull your hood up, because this is a long one and the rain won't wait for us. My grandfather had a forge under the arches behind the cattle market, and in the wet winter of the coal strike he was asked to make a gate for a house on the hill above the mill. The man who commissioned it wanted ferns. Not the ferns you'd buy in a pot, mind, but ferns rolled tight in early spring, the way they curl at the tip before they open.

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Grandad worked three weeks on it. He heated the bars until they went the colour of barley sugar and turned them with tongs his own father had bent. Every scroll he drew on the anvil came out with a little feather off its side, a barb of iron no thicker than a fingernail, and every one he filed away grew back under the hammer. The apprentice, a lad called Dennis Clough, said the iron was remembering something. Grandad told him to hush and hit harder.

When the gate was hung, the widow came down in her husband's coat to see it. She stood in the rain with her palm flat on the top bar for the longest time and said nothing. Then she asked for the second gate the same, and the third, and so on down the hill until there were nine, each one a little different, as if the ferns had been turning towards a different light each time.

I still have the last scroll he kept back, in a biscuit tin on my shelf. Go on, you can hold it. Feel how cold it stays, even in your palm? That's the rain getting into the iron. Now, who's buying the teapot, because I've been talking since Tuesday and my throat's gone.