Black and grey photograph of a flowing scroll and swirl tattoo across a person's lower abdomen, above a studded belt.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black swirl tattoo on the abdomen

Other · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows a torso with a large black ornamental tattoo of curling scrolls, swirls and filigree spreading across the lower abdomen towards the hip. The linework is bold and mostly solid black with fine detail at the curl tips, and there is no visible shading beyond the skin's natural tones. The photograph is black and white, with the tattoo framed centrally against a dark studded belt, jeans and a hand resting in a pocket.

Other Swirl Scroll Filigree Ornament Abdomen

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band at the Palais has stopped for the interval, and you are standing under the mezzanine where the ironwork curls out over the balcony rail like something that grew there. Mr Ashdown's foundry cast those scrolls in Wolverhampton forty years ago, and you have spent every Saturday since tracing them with your eye while the girls twirl below. Tonight you are tracing them because Edith has not come back from the cloakroom.

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She comes down the back stairs with her hair pinned flat and a ticket stub tucked in her glove. "They've shut the ladies' gallery," she says. "Somebody's had the brass fittings off the rail." You look up. Where the scrolls meet the newel post there is a gap the size of a hand, and the filigree around it has been pried loose like the lid of a biscuit tin. Whoever did it knew exactly which curl would come away clean.

The two of you spend the second half of the evening counting the missing pieces from the mezzanine and sketching them on the back of a programme with a borrowed pencil. Edith draws faster than you and gets the tail of each spiral right. You get the tips, the tiny hooks that finish every curl. By the last waltz you have the whole balcony on paper, every scroll accounted for, and a name you both suspect but neither of you says aloud.

At midnight the manager locks the doors, and you hand him the programme. He studies the drawing for a long time, then folds it into his waistcoat pocket. "Put it back on the rail," he says, "and I'll not ask who took it." Edith laughs all the way to the tram stop, and you walk home counting curls on the cobbles.