Black and grey brushstroke tattoo sweeping across a man's upper back and down onto the shoulder, with small ink spatters near the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Brushstroke tattoo across a shoulder blade

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bare male back and shoulder, with the top of the head and beard partly visible at the top edge of the frame. The tattoo is made of loose, sweeping black and grey brushstrokes with soft, feathered edges, with a few small ink dots near the upper arm. The dark background keeps the focus on the skin and the soft, gradient shading of the strokes.

Back Shoulder Brushstroke Abstract

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

In the kingdom of Morrowmere, the ink-maker Edda Sallow kept one brush that no apprentice was allowed to touch. Its bristles were the tail hair of a grey mare who had carried the first royal letter across the salt marsh, and Edda oiled it every evening as if it might still be sent somewhere.

Keep reading

When the drought came, the river at Tarn dropped to cracked mud and the reeds turned the colour of old ash. The king sent for her. He wanted the river painted on the granary wall so the sky would learn where to send its rain. Edda ground soot in rainwater and made three strokes on the plaster: one long sweep, lifted at the end, a second that broke off at the elbow, and a third that dragged and feathered out into nothing.

The men laughed. "That isn't a river, that's a torn sail," said the steward. Edda said nothing. She flicked her wrist, and a spray of black dots flew off the bristles and settled on the wall like starlings lifting from a field.

That night rain fell on the granary roof. By morning the strokes had bled softer at their edges and pooled into the cracks of the plaster, and the river had found its own bed through the dry country. The king paid her in a sack of salt, and Edda never painted anything straight again. The granary wall still stands at Tarn, and the children there say the water remembers the brush.