Back view of a dark grey ornamental tattoo between the shoulder blades, with a cream crochet open-back top and a grey sweater shown in a side panel.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dark grey ornate tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A two-panel photo: on the left a full-length view of a woman in a grey sweater, rolled blue jeans and leopard print heels, and on the right a close view of her bare upper back. The tattoo sits between the shoulder blades in dark grey ink, with ornate, somewhat sketchy shading whose exact motif is hard to make out. The warm skin tones contrast with the cream crochet lace of the open-back top.

Back Tattoo Upper back Jeans

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The net loft smelled of tar and wet rope the morning Aunt Mirren put a crochet hook in my hand and told me to stop frowning at it. I was nine. The hook was bone-handled and worn pale where her thumb had rested for fifty years. Outside, the boats came in grey over the harbour wall, and the gulls kept pace with the nets on the quay.

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She taught me the triangle first: three loops, a turn, and a fourth loop pulled tight so the points stood up like little sails. Then came the long scalloped edge the fishwives at Kettle Quay wore to chapel. Every finished piece went out in brown paper on the Tuesday bus. Nobody asked where the pattern came from. Mirren said it was a moth's wing she had seen pressed inside a drowned sailor's Bible, but she told it so many ways that I began to suspect she made it up each time to stop me asking twice.

The summer I turned seventeen, a man from the cannery brought an envelope and a drawing of something he wanted worked in dark grey thread across the back of a wool coat. It was not a moth, he insisted, and he would not say what it was. Mirren refused, then didn't. We sat under the lamp for nine nights, and on the tenth she unpicked my first row with her scissors and said a mistake at the edge pulls the whole body out of true.

I finished it on a Friday, the coat still warm from the drying shed. When the cannery man collected it he ran his thumb along the scallops, stopped at a point near the hem, and smiled. I had stitched a tiny kettle there, with a crooked handle, because nobody on the quay ever did anything the easy way. Mirren saw it and laughed until she had to sit down on the nets.