Full back tattoo in black and grey realism showing a pentagram, faces, an angel, a boombox, a factory and hooded figures, placed across the back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Full back collage tattoo in black and grey

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo covers the whole of a person's back, seen from behind, with the arms partly visible at the sides. It is a collage of scenes including a pentagram, several faces, a winged figure, a boombox, a factory with chimneys, hooded figures and a hand. The work uses fine greyscale shading and realistic rendering throughout, with the scenes arranged densely across the skin.

Realism Back Pentagram Face Angel Wing Hooded figure Hand Tree Collage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boombox had been playing the same cassette for three days when Dad carried it out to the lane and set it on the stone wall, turned up so loud that the rooks lifted out of the sallows and didn't come back until dusk. Nobody in Hollin Edge said anything. We had all heard the tune before, though none of us could name it, and we had all agreed long ago not to walk past the old works after dark.

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The works had been shut since the winter the pit flooded, and its four chimneys still stood over the trees like fingers pointing at nothing. Every Thursday, men in long grey hoods climbed up from the drained valley and stood round the great oak at the forest's edge, palms pressed flat to the bark, humming under their breath. My grandmother said they were paying a debt. My father said they were only old men who had lost their jobs and their way home.

I took the cassette to the oak myself on the Thursday, pushing through the bracken with the tape in my coat pocket. The bark had split open like a door, and inside, where the heartwood should have been, sat a radio with its dial glowing amber. When I pressed play, the hooded men turned round, and when they pushed their hoods back they were only faces I knew: the postman, the vicar's son, my father's brother who had gone down the pit years before and never come up. They looked tired, and they asked if I had brought the song.

I gave it to them. The tune rose through the branches, the rooks came back, and across the valley the chimneys breathed out one long grey sigh before going quiet. Dad has the boombox back on the shelf now, silent. But on Thursdays I still hear someone humming at the edge of the wood, and when I pass the oak the bark is warm under my palm.