Black tribal-style swirl tattoo with leaf shapes curling around a person's navel on the lower abdomen.

Black swirl and leaf tattoo around the navel

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black tattoo of a curling vine with two leaf shapes and a spiral tail sits around the navel on the abdomen. The linework is solid and smooth, with tapered ends and no shading, giving a graphic tribal-style look. The image is in black ink only, with the navel centred in the composition and a black top at the upper edge of the frame.

Blackwork Other Swirl Vine Leaf Spiral

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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 closer, you lot, the fire only warms the first half of a story. Hear me out. Beside the road to Kallis there was a well with a stone rim worn smooth by goats, and in its middle a single fig vine had decided to grow. It did not climb. It curled. Each year it wound one loop tighter around the mouth of the water, the way a child winds thread round a finger to keep hold of it.

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A potter named Demeas came by with two jars and a sour temper. He wanted the water and had no patience for the vine. He took his knife to the tail of it, the long spiral that ran down toward the dark, and he cut. The vine bled milk. The old woman who kept the well came out with her hair full of ash and said nothing at all, only pointed at the leaves. Two of them had already turned to face the sun he was standing in.

Demeas laughed and filled his jars. That night the water in his house tasted of bark, and he could not sleep for the sound of something turning slowly in the yard. By dawn the vine had walked its loop back round the well, and its tail had grown again, curled tight as a fist, pointing at the man who had made the cut.

So when you draw water, friends, go gently round the middle. Something there is keeping count.