Black dotwork tattoo of a slender tower with a round top, running vertically down the centre of a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork spire tattoo down the upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A slender tower shape with a small round head sits in the centre of the upper back and runs vertically down the spine. The outline is a fine black line, while the tower body and round top are filled with dense stippled dots that create the shading. The image is in black ink only, with the pale skin and grey top framing the design.

Dotwork Back Tower Spire Sphere

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mast at Holm Rise was never meant to be looked at, Dorothea Vane used to say, only climbed. Thirty-one storeys of lattice and wire rose behind the chapel, and at the top a glass sphere the size of a rain butt held the red lamp that the fishing boats steered by. Nobody in Ashby Cross paid it much mind until the winter the lamp began to fail.

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She sent her nephew Tom up with a tin of paraffin and a sack of dry rags. He came down at dawn with frost in his eyebrows and a story he could not stop telling. Inside the glass, he said, someone had drawn the whole tower in dots, thousands of them, fine as sand, crowding the inside of the sphere so the lamp shone through a grey fog. He had rubbed at them with his thumb and they would not come off.

Dorothea climbed up herself the next night with a pen from her late husband's desk. The dots were older than the mast, she reckoned, or at least older than the ink she had on her hands. Each one she placed slowly, counting under her breath, and each count was a boat she had waved off in her youth and a face she had watched come back over the harbour wall. She lost track near the four hundredth and started again.

When the sky greyed over the estuary she set the pen down and leaned her forehead against the cold glass. Below her the first trawler turned its bow toward the harbour mouth, steering by a light that was, at last, complete.