Black and white photo of a fine line tattoo running vertically down a person's upper back, with small marks along the line, in a fine line style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line vertical marks down the spine

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a person's upper back, with a thin vertical line tattoo running down the centre of the spine. Small fine marks sit along the line, and the head and denim jacket straps are partly visible at the edges of the frame. The linework is delicate and the tattoo is in black ink on a light background, with no shading or colour.

Fine line Back Vertical line Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The staff had been cut from a ship's spar and bolted to the seaward wall of the boathouse, and Ada Pringle ran her thumb down it the way her father had taught her, reading the notches before she looked. Nineteen marks above the waterline, each one a spring tide he had cut with his own knife. The last was dated in his square capitals, and beneath it the wood was bare.

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The forecast said the surge would come on the big tide at two. Tom from the light had rowed across at dusk with a sack of paraffin and a face like wet slate, saying the coastguard men would have the island emptied by midnight. Ada told him she would stay with the staff. He called her a stubborn thing and left her the lantern anyway, and she sat on an upturned crate with the door open to the wind, counting the swell as it slapped the lower rungs of the steps.

At ten past two the water reached the twentieth notch, then hesitated, lifting and sinking in the lamp's sweep like something deciding. Ada took the knife from her apron and cut a new line above the old. It was shallow and crooked, and the sea slid back a finger's width below it before the tide turned. She wrote the date beside it with the grease pencil, then blew out the lantern, because the light was done and so was she.