Back of a woman with her hair in an updo, showing a dotwork tattoo of dots and drops forming a pendant down the spine, with a band of dots over the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork pendant design across a woman's back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with blonde hair in a loose updo is seen from behind, with a tattoo of dots and drops across the upper back. The design forms a central vertical pendant ending in a larger teardrop, with a fringe of dots and short lines spreading over the shoulders. A smaller strand of dots runs along the upper arm on the right, and the dark ink stands out against the pale peach background.

Dotwork Back Upper arm Dot Teardrop Pendant Drop Ornamental pattern Woman Back

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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

You learn the trade the way the fair teaches everything, by being shoved in front of the wrong customer. By the third week at Hollins' Travelling Show you can string glass beads faster than Mrs Parrish can count her change, and you know the difference between a bead that sells and one that only looks like it might.

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The beadwork stall sits between the helter-skelter and the goldfish tent, under an awning the colour of weak tea. Old Tobias keeps the good stock in a biscuit tin under the counter: jet drops he swears came off a chandelier in a house that burned, and a single larger teardrop, dark as a bruise, that he never lets anyone hold. He tells you it is for a girl who has not come yet. You stop asking after the third time he says it.

On the last night of the season the wind takes the awning and the lamps go out one by one along the midway. You sit on the tin with a needle and a spool of waxed thread, stringing a pendant by touch, dot after dot, a fringe of short drops falling from the hook like rain off a gutter. When you reach the big teardrop you find it is already threaded on, the knot tied by someone with neater hands than yours.

Tobias is gone when you look up, the flap swinging. On the counter sits a ticket for the next town and a note in his cramped hand: the thread holds if you pull it tight. You pull. The whole pendant lifts into the lamplight, and only then do you see it is not a necklace at all but a route, every dot a stop along the way, and the teardrop sitting at the far end of it, waiting for you to arrive.