Black and white photo of a shaved-headed man seen from behind, with a large blackwork tribal tattoo across his back, shoulders and upper arm.

Blackwork tribal back and shoulder tattoo

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A man is photographed from behind with his arm raised to his head. His back and shoulders carry a large blackwork design of bold, solid black panels outlined by curving white bands and fine parallel lines. A band of patterned bands wraps the upper arm, and a small ornate motif sits at the nape of the neck.

Blackwork Geometric Back Shoulder Upper arm Neck Tribal Geometric line Abstract pattern Band Man Back

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 road out of Coldwater Flats ran straight for forty miles across the pan, and it was Ruth Vallance's job to keep the white lines visible. Every spring the wind pushed black grit across the tarmac until the edges vanished, and drivers who could not see the edges drifted off into the salt. So she walked it with a hand-cart of lime and a brush on a long pole, drawing the bands that told a car where it was.

Keep reading

The trouble began the year a stranger came up from the coast with a notebook full of drawings. He said the lines were wrong. Straight was for surveyors, he said, and a road ought to curve like a river that had forgotten where it was going. He offered her money to bend the bands into the shapes in his book: wide dark wedges like shelter, with slim white lines running off them like roots. She told him the lines were not for beauty. He smiled and said everything was for something.

She refused him, and he left, and that autumn a storm came off the ridge with no warning. Three lorries pulled onto the shoulder to wait it out, lost in the brown dark. Ruth walked out with her lantern and found the old lines still shining under the dust, the plain straight bands she had painted every year since she was a girl. She followed them to the lorries, one by one, and led the drivers home.

Next spring she repainted the road exactly as before. The stranger's notebook is still in the Wells post office, and nobody has ever used it.