Fine line swirl flourish tattoo in blue, green, purple and red running vertically across a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Coloured swirl flourish on upper back

Fine line · Back · Colour · Photo

A vertical flourish of curling scrolls and tendrils sits across the upper back of a person whose face is not shown. The thin outlines are coloured in blue, green, purple and red, with the upper section shaded in blue and green and the lower section in red and purple. The design is centred on the skin with plenty of space around it, and a small dark mark is partly visible at the right edge.

Fine line Back Swirl Flourish Scroll Tendril

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the cinders. The dog has heard this one already, so he may keep his nose on his paws. You want the tale of the vine that grew up the old oak at the edge of Hob's Wood. Right, then.

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Every spring it came up out of the leaf mould, thin as thread and the colour of nothing, and every spring the children of Thrushcombe tried to tear it down before it could wind round the trunk. Nobody pulled harder than Bessie Marr, who had been told by her gran that the wood kept accounts and always collected. One wet April she hacked at the vine with a billhook until her palms were sore. The vine did not snap. It curled. Where its sap touched her fingers it left a streak of blue, then green, then the red of a robin's breast, then a purple like the skin of a ripe plum.

The vine climbed on, unrolling its scrolls like bracken in sunshine, and it kept its colours in the dark when the rest of the wood went grey. Folk learned to leave it be. Bessie grew up, married a carter called Tom Gossard, and moved to the far side of the river, yet every time she crossed the water her fingertips prickled and the old oak showed a fresh curl of green.

When her gran finally died, Bessie walked back through the wood with a sack of her things. At the oak she found the vine had flowered in the night, one blossom for every name her family had ever spoken in that village. She counted eleven, then twelve, and went home without a single grievance left to carry. Mind, if you go pulling weeds in Hob's Wood, do it kindly. The wood is keeping count.