Four numbered photos of a black swirling design on a person's upper back, showing the tattoo before removal, then the treated, fading and largely cleared skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four-stage tattoo removal on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

Four numbered panels show the same area of upper back over stages of tattoo removal. Panel 1 shows a black linework design with swirling, dragon-like curves, while panel 2 shows the treated skin pale, flaky and slightly red. Panels 3 and 4 show smooth skin with only faint marks remaining, and the photos are taken at similar angles and close framing.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mary Tregenza had scrubbed the lamp room wall every spring since the ink first went on, and every spring the salt won a little more. Her husband Joseph had drawn the dragon the winter the Mena went down, a black coil of curls rising off the whitewash like smoke from a snuffed wick. He said a sea beast on the gallery would keep the drowned men honest. Mary thought it looked like an eel pinned to a board.

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The first rough winter the lines blurred to grey. Mary took a stiff brush and a bucket of vinegar and worked the curls back out, the way you'd unpick a torn sleeve. By the third winter the tail had gone to a shadow and the spiral at the top looked like a thumbprint on glass. Joseph watched from the stairs with his pipe cold in his teeth, and said nothing about the vinegar.

In March a supply boat brought a young painter from Penzance, Eliza Quick, sent to record the coast for a county society. She climbed the spiral stair with a satchel of paper and stopped dead on the landing. "Who did this?" she asked, pointing at the ghost of the beast. "My husband, before the rocks had their say." Eliza sketched it four times, each sheet a little fainter than the last, until the dragon was little more than the outline a sailor might remember.

On her last evening she pinned a clean sheet to the lamp room door and went down to the boat without saying goodbye. Mary found it at dawn: the dragon, every curl drawn back in ink as black as the day it was first painted, and beneath it, in careful copperplate, Joseph's name and the single word kept. The lamp turned overhead, and for the first time in years the beam caught the wall and lit the coil without a flaw.

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From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.