Back view of a man with a tall black brushstroke tattoo down the spine and geometric blackwork sleeves on both arms.

Brushstroke spine tattoo with geometric sleeves

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A single tall, vertical black brushstroke runs down the centre of the back, with soft grey streaks and feathered edges at the top and bottom. Both upper arms are covered in dense black blackwork sleeves, with white negative-space lines forming spirals, circles and angular geometric motifs. The subject faces away from the camera against a plain pale grey backdrop, and the tattoos are shown in clear, even lighting.

Blackwork Geometric Back Upper arm Brushstroke Spine Sleeve Spiral Geometric pattern Circle Line

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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 soot has dried on the tablet before you finish grinding it, so Ninshubur takes the slate from your hands and tips it toward the lamp. "Too wet," she says. "A line that drinks like that bleeds into the sign beside it." You have spent three winters learning that a stroke must be made once, from the top of the reed to the bottom, and never lifted halfway through. Your wrists still ache from practising on sand.

Keep reading

The commission comes from the temple of the river god. They want a boundary mark painted down the length of the granary wall, a single tall stroke, dark at the centre and grey at the edges where the brush runs dry. The old custom says the scribe who paints it must afterwards walk the canal banks and count the carved spirals on each sluice gate, because the marks are meant to be read as a map of where the water is allowed to go.

You go out before dawn with a pot of soot, a reed brush and a jar of water that smells of cedar. The granary wall is cold under your palm. You draw the stroke in one movement, feeling it skip at the top and feather out at the foot where the brush runs dry, and you do not lift it. Then you walk the canal. Circles, spirals and angular hooks are cut into every gate, white where the water has worn the clay, and for the first time you read them as a path rather than decoration.

When you return, the overseer squints at the wall and asks whether the line is straight. You look at it for a long moment, at the grey streaks where the reed ran dry and the dark body beneath them. "Straight enough," you tell him, which is the only honesty a scribe owes.