Black and grey full back tattoo of a robed wizard with a pointed hat beside a cloaked warrior with a sword, with framed scenes above and below, covering the whole back.

Full back piece with robed wizard and figures

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large full back piece shows a tall robed wizard with a pointed hat and staff at centre, with a cloaked figure holding a sword to the right and a seated figure to the left. Framed medallion scenes sit at the top corners and below the waist, including a small figure in a boat, and fallen figures and rocky ground fill the lower right. The work uses fine, detailed black linework and grey shading on a pale skin tone, with no colour ink, and the composition is symmetrical around the spine.

Back Staff Sword Cloak Warrior Seated figure Boat Medallion Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The river at Carrow Ford had no bridge for forty years, so Edda Marr poled her flat boat across it for anyone with a coin or a good enough lie. She had seen armies come down to the water before, but never one that had already lost. The shields lay split in the rushes on the far bank, and the men who had carried them were laid out in rows where the mud had gone pale.

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The wizard came first, leaning on a staff that threw a thin green light across the water. His beard was grey as wet ash, and his hat had a point that bent a little at the tip, as if weather had sat on it. Behind him walked a cloaked rider with a sword held low, its blade notched near the hilt. The rider did not speak. The wizard did.

He offered her no coin. He offered her a name, a true one, to carry across the river and set down in the old stones on the other side, so that nobody who had died on that field would be forgotten. Edda told him the river took only what was owed, and that she kept no ledger for names. Up on the bank a hooded figure sat folded against a rock, and it had not moved in three days. She had stopped asking it for money.

She poled them over with the sky going the colour of pewter. When she reached the middle, the staff's light went out, and the rider lowered his head as if listening for something under the water. At the landing the wizard stepped off without thanks, and the rider after him. When Edda turned the boat back, she found a single silver coin on the bottom board, warm as a hand and stamped with a face she did not know. She kept it. The river never asked for it back.