Black tribal-style swirl tattoo with bands and spirals running down and across the back of a person seated on grass.

Black tribal swirl tattoo across a back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a person from behind, sitting outdoors on grass with a white cloth across the lower body. Two long black bands with spiral curls and ornamental patterns run from the upper back down the side, with one curl sitting near the shoulder blade. The bold, dense linework is solid black on warm skin, with a plain green garden background.

Back Swirl Spiral Band Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Take the tide out far enough, my grandmother used to say, and the reef will show you its bones. That was the summer the boats stopped coming from Savai'i and my uncle Tavita sat on the seawall every evening with a coconut husk and a knife, carving the long waves that his father had carved before him. He never let anyone watch. Children were sent home when they came near, and the fishermen pretended not to notice the shavings that drifted onto the sand.

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One night the wind turned and the sea came up the beach past the lines of stones. Tavita kept carving while the water crept over his feet. He said the currents were writing on him, that every spiral was a wave folding back on itself to find where it began. When the water reached the second step he simply moved his stool and went on, and the children who had been sent home came creeping back to watch the knife turn the husk into a curl like the one a wave makes at the end of its run.

He finished the carving at dawn. It was the shape of two currents running side by side, each one curling inward toward a small round eye, and the old men who looked at it said it could not be read from the front, only from behind, as you would read a path you were already walking. My cousin Losa still has it on her windowsill in Auckland. She says the tide never comes in there, which is exactly why she keeps it.