Woman seen from behind with a black linework tattoo on her upper back, featuring a large animal head and a vertical column of geometric blocks down the spine.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric and animal linework across a back

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with long blonde hair, seen from behind, wears a black open-back dress with crossed straps. Her upper back carries black linework showing an animal head on one side, with curved, feathered shapes beside it and a vertical column of stacked rectangular blocks running down the centre of the spine. The shading appears to be solid black ink with no clear colour, and the subject is framed against a window overlooking a building.

Geometric Back Animal head Spine Linework Wing

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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

Sit down, the kettle's still warm, and mind the loose tile by the door. You want the tale of Idris Vane, who climbed the Stack of Hollin after the sea came back for the low cities, when the lifts had been dead forty years and nobody would admit it. Every block of that tower was a room, every room a family, and the families stacked one upon another like cups in a cupboard. Nobody went up. Up was where the wind lived.

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Idris was a glazier's boy with a cat's head inked across his back, put there by a grandmother who had learned the work from a man who had learned it from the sea. When he was small, the old women said the cat would pull him up the walls by his shoulders if he ever wanted to leave. He believed them. He was the only child in Hollin who did.

So one wet spring he took a coil of rope, a tin of pitch, and a wing he had carved from driftwood, and he started at the ground floor, counting blocks aloud. Forty-one rooms before the first landing. Nineteen more to the crossed beams, where the wind got into everything. Thirty-six past that, and a stone sparrow on a ledge that watched him with one eye and said nothing at all.

At the top he found a single window with the glass still whole, and a room with nothing in it but a table set for two. The dust on the plates lay undisturbed. He sat in the chair facing the empty one and looked down at the city he had come from, every block lit by one lamp, and he understood that the stack had never kept anyone in. It had only kept them looking down.