Man seen from behind with a column of teal circles running down his spine, a small bird on his lower left back and a blue-green arm tattoo on his right upper arm.

Circle spine tattoo on a muscular back

Geometric · Back · Colour · Photo

A shirtless man is photographed from behind against a plain white background, with his head cropped out of frame. A vertical column of teal and blue-grey circles, some plain and some concentric, runs down the centre of his spine, growing larger towards the middle of the back. A small dark bird sits on the lower left back, and a blue-green tattoo covers part of his right shoulder and upper arm.

Geometric Back Upper arm Circle Concentric circle Spine Bird Wave

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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

Mrs Hale had left the brass orrery in the big top with a note pinned to its frame, and the note said only: fix it before the lamps go on. You found it jammed at dusk, its copper discs seized on their spindles, a swift's nest wedged in the gear teeth beneath the painted sun. Generators coughed across the field, and the waltzers spun their blue sea in long curls over the grass.

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The orrery was built like a stack of coins. The sun was the size of a cartwheel, and around it ran rings of smaller discs, some plain slate and some ringed inside with a paler line, like the eyes of the old owls Mrs Hale kept on the caravan roof. Each disc was meant to turn at its own speed, and each had a name painted on its rim in faded gold: Ruth, Ebbe, Tom, Little Sally. You had never asked who named them. You only knew the smallest one had to be oiled last, or it would stick.

You freed the nest with a butter knife and set the young swift on the tent pole, where it sat blinking while its mother circled the rafters and cried at you. The sun turned. The rings followed in their slow order, Ruth, then Ebbe, then Tom, and the pale bead of Little Sally came round last and caught the lamplight.

When the first children came in from the dark, nobody asked why the machine was singing. You stood at the rope with your greasy hands in your pockets and watched the smallest disc go round, and the bird, still on the pole, did not fly away until the music stopped.