Black and grey photo of a tribal swirl tattoo running down the side of the hip, above lace underwear.

Black swirl tribal tattoo on the hip

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a torso from the chest to the upper thighs, with the subject's face out of frame. A solid black tribal design of spirals and interlocking swirls runs diagonally down the side of the hip. The image is monochrome with soft natural light, and the tattoo is the main point of focus against the skin.

Blackwork Other Tribal Swirl Spiral Ornamental pattern Torso

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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

The chart had been drawn by a man who never once set foot in a boat, and Agnes Pollard had spent eleven winters correcting his mistakes in red ink. Every spring the bay at Scarra Holm filled and emptied with a patience that looked, from the top of the cliff, like a long unspooling of thread. Her uncle used to call the eddies the Knots. Agnes preferred to think of them as handwriting, something the sea was trying to say in a language nobody had bothered to learn.

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She worked with brass dividers and a tide-clock that wheezed whenever the damp got into it. Each morning she walked the strand at low water with a slate, marking where the wrack line curled back on itself. The swirls were never quite the same twice, but they kept a shape, a spiral that tightened toward the skerry and then broke off into a run of smaller rings, like a fern unrolling in reverse. She had copied the pattern into the margin of the chart so many times that the paper had gone soft there.

On the nineteenth day of the summer she found the centre of the spiral had moved. Not much, perhaps the width of a hand, but the stone she had used as her fixed point now lay in the open with weed streaming off it toward the south. Beneath it, pressed flat into the sand, was an iron ring the size of a dinner plate, rusted into the shape of a coil. She stood there with the slate under her arm while the tide came back in, and she understood that the sea had not been circling the bay at all. It had been circling something that wanted to be found.

She did not draw it on the chart. She wrote a single line in the margin instead, and left room beneath it for the next loop.