Black and grey photograph of a bare back and side with a flowing abstract fine line tattoo of wave-like strands across the ribs and lower back.

Flowing black lines across ribs and back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photo shows a bare back and side of a person lying against a damask-patterned wallpaper, with the head and face out of frame. A large abstract tattoo of bold black lines and clusters of fine parallel lines sweeps from the shoulder blade down across the ribs and curves toward the waistband. The image is black and grey with soft, even lighting and the ink has crisp, dense linework.

Fine line Back Ribs Wave Ribbon

Find an artist for this

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

Her mother had sent her down to the weir with a skein of black silk and orders not to come back until the river had taken the last of it. Nessa did as she was told, mostly. She knelt on the wet stones below the mill and drew the thread through her fingers, and the water took it the way water takes anything, pulling it into loops that folded over one another and then came undone.

Keep reading

The river liked the look of it. Each time a loop opened, a line of current ran out behind it, fine as a hair, and the pool at the foot of the weir began to hum. The millers' dogs came down and sat on the bank with their ears flat. Old Hasket, who had sold eels in the market for forty years and believed in nothing he could not gut, came down with his cap in his hands.

"Only letting it go," Nessa said.

"Then let it go properly. Water doesn't keep what it's given. It passes it on." He crouched beside her, and for a while neither spoke. The silk had gone thin and black and was running now in one long ribbon, bending hard at the rocks and easing out at the bends, past the mill, past the chapel, through the reeds, towards a sea nobody in the valley had seen in a hundred years.

When the last of it slipped from her fingers she did not watch it go. She went home with dry hands, and her mother asked where the silk was. Nessa said the river had it. Her mother said that was a poor answer. Nessa agreed. That night she lay awake and felt the pull of it running under the floorboards, steady as a pulse, carrying every loose end in the valley down to the water.