Bold black abstract symbol tattoo with a looped base on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Bold black abstract symbol on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black abstract symbol sits on the upper back near the shoulder blade, with a rounded hook at the top and a looping curve below. The shapes are filled in with heavy black ink and have a faint grey shadow along one edge, giving them some depth. The skin is pale and the tattoo is centred in the frame, with a blue top edge and blonde hair visible at the top left.

Back Swirl Loop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming down on Scarrow market since before the bells, and Nan Ostle had stopped pretending it would ease. She sat under her oilcloth with a tin of nails in her lap, sorting the good from the bent, when a boy in a sodden cap came splashing between the fish stalls holding a lantern by its wire.

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The lantern had a hook at the top, a crook of iron worn bright where a hand had gripped it, and the wire below had looped and knotted itself into a long curl. "Mam says you can mend anything with a bit of heat," he said. Nan turned it over. The iron was cold and grey-black with age. She fed the hook into the brazier under her table, waited until it glowed the colour of a late apple, and drew the curl out again with two pairs of pliers, slow as pulling thread through wax.

"Whose is it?" she asked. "My da's. He hung it on the sluice gate the night the water came up, and he never came back down the steps." Nan knew that sluice. Forty years ago her own man had bent that same hook for the toll-keeper, and they had been paid in eels and a promise, and the promise had never been kept. She pressed the iron straight, then curled it back under, and the lantern swung true on its shackle.

The boy wiped his face with his sleeve and pressed a single bent penny into her palm. Rain drummed on the oilcloth. When she looked up he was already gone into the grey, the light rocking low through the stalls towards the water, and Nan kept the penny in her apron pocket while the gutters filled and emptied and filled again.