Black and grey ornamental damask scrollwork tattoo covering the back of the neck, photographed from behind with hair tied up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black ornamental damask tattoo on the back of a neck

Blackwork · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's neck, seen from behind, is covered by a symmetrical black ornamental design of scrolls, leaves and damask-style motifs that runs from below the hairline towards the shoulders. The linework is solid and fairly fine, with dense filled areas and open scrollwork, and there is a faint floral outline lower down on the left. The image is black and white, with a dark background and the hair pulled up.

Blackwork Neck Ornament Scrollwork Floral Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Harrow Pike Tower could say who first pasted the damask paper in flat fourteen, only that it had been there longer than the lift. Its pattern ran in dark swirls on a pale ground, scrolls curling round leaves and leaves curling back into scrolls, and the old tenants said a stitcher had drawn it from the ironwork on a chapel gate in a village the reservoir drowned. Mrs Adaeze Holloway had lived under it for thirty-one years. Each winter she scraped at one corner with a butter knife and never got past the first scroll.

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When the council sent a man to strip the walls, the paper would not come away. Each sheet tore along the same lines, and after a fortnight he went home with a headache and a box of wrong measurements. The next tenant, a lad called Tomasz who painted signs for the bus depot, decided the pattern was simply more stubborn than the damp. He traced one repeat onto greaseproof paper, then onto the back of his hand, then onto the lift wall in marker pen while the lift was out of service.

The lift came back on a Tuesday and the marker lines were gone, scrubbed off by somebody with a sense of order. Tomasz drew them again, all the way round the wall, and by the end of March every scroll in the stairwell matched the scrolls in flat fourteen, down to the little notch at the base of each leaf. Then the paper came off the wall in one piece, like a sheet pulled from a bed, and under it the plaster was bare and plain.

Mrs Holloway carried the sheet down nine flights to the bins and laid it flat on the wet concrete. The leaves folded back on themselves exactly where they always had, and she said that was the trouble with patterns: they only ever wanted to be finished.