Woman seen from behind on a sandy beach, with black vertical script-like tattoos on her upper back, a small black symbol at the nape and a grey rose on her upper arm.

Black script and rose tattoos on a beach

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair in a bun faces away from the camera towards a calm bay with wooded hills. Several black vertical script-like marks run down the upper back, with a small symbol above them near the nape, and a shaded grey rose sits on the upper arm at the right edge. The composition is soft and natural, with light, sandy foreground and sky in the background.

Back Upper arm Script Symbol Rose Beach

Find an artist for this

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 ink ran in the damp, so Edie copied each column twice before she trusted it. Eleven vertical lines, read top to bottom as the ferrywoman had shown her, and beneath them a small knot of signs that nobody on the bay would name. The museum in Harwick had sent her out with a notebook, a pencil that refused to hold a point, and a letter promising a wage she had been too proud to haggle over.

Keep reading

Anong, who ran the long boat across to the far side of the bay, read the marks with her thumb, moving down the stone as if following a sentence she knew by heart. She said the column was a list of boats in the order they had come home, a line for each, and that the small knot was the mark of the tide that had not brought them back. Edie wrote that down, then crossed it out, then wrote it again, because the notebook was for facts and she was not sure this was one.

On the last afternoon the wind dropped and the water went flat and pale as a plate. Edie counted the lines a final time and found there were ten names and an eleventh space, cut clean and empty. She asked Anong what it was for. Anong shrugged and pushed off from the sand. "For whoever is next," she said, "or for whoever stays ashore and writes it down."

Edie sat on the hot sand with the notebook on her knee and the pencil between her teeth. Out past the headland a single boat was coming in slowly, its sail hanging limp. She wrote the date in the margin, then left the last line where it was.