Back view of a man with a large solid black blackwork tattoo of geometric stripes and angular bands across the back, shoulders and upper arms.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black geometric stripe tattoo across a back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A man is photographed from behind, with a large area of solid black ink forming bold vertical stripes and angular, arrow-like bands. Thin strips of bare skin run between the black shapes, creating a graphic, symmetrical pattern that follows the spine and wraps over the shoulders and upper arms. The ink is black only, with no shading or greys, and the background shows a painted wall and red flowers.

Blackwork Geometric Back Shoulder Upper arm Stripe Line Geometric pattern Abstract

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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 down, sit down, and don't touch the rail, it's older than your mother. Right. You want the lines? Every block in Hollin Court had them once. In nineteen fifty-nine the council sent men with a tin of black gloss and a fellow called Dessie who could paint a straight line without a string. He went up and down the stairwell from the ground to the roof, and wherever the concrete was bare he laid down a band of black, one hand's width, then left a strip of grey plaster the width of two fingers, then another band. He said a building needed a spine, and a spine tells you which way is up even when the lights go.

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Your grandad used to count them on the way home from the pub. Twenty-two bands on the landing, he'd say, and if you got to the fourteenth you were nearly home. Then the lifts broke, and the damp came through, and nobody painted anything for years. Dessie went to Leeds. The black went grey, then brown, and the plaster strips filled with dirt until you couldn't tell which was which.

Last spring a girl from the housing association came with a camera and a young man who knew about old walls. They scraped the stairwell back, and under forty years of paint the black was still there, deep as a bruise. They didn't repaint it exactly. They left the lines where Dessie put them, arrows pointing up at every turn, and when they finished the building had its shape again, something you could follow in the dark.

Now the lift works, mostly. Go on, climb the stairs with me and count. One, and the bare strip. Two, and the bare strip. Keep your hand on the wall where the black is. That's the way home.