Back of a person with dark hair in a bun, showing a symmetrical black blackwork geometric tattoo that spreads across the upper back and up the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric black tattoo across upper back and neck

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with hair tied in a loose bun is seen from behind, with a large symmetrical tattoo covering the nape, upper back and reaching towards both shoulders. The design is built from interlocking angular lines and maze-like shapes in solid black ink, with a central spine running down the back. The plain pale wall behind gives the dark linework strong contrast, and the composition is centred on the tattoo.

Geometric Blackwork Back Neck Geometric pattern Symmetrical design Line Back piece

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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

You have been drawing the stairwell of Harrow Point for three weeks, though the council only paid for one. Every landing on the seventeen floors turns back on itself, so the lines you trace on squared paper fold into a shape like a hedge, or a root system, or the inside of a clock. Mrs Okonedo on the eleventh floor says the architects copied a maze from a Dutch pattern book, and that they never finished the lifts because the lifts would have spoiled it.

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You start at the bottom, where the spine of the building runs straight down from the bin store to the roof hatch, and work outward. The left wing turns three times before it meets the right. Someone has scratched a tally beside the fire door on the fourth floor, four strokes and a cross, and when you come back the next day the cross has been drawn over again in fresh grey. You begin to suspect the building is counting you back.

On the last evening, the caretaker, Dessie, lets you onto the roof. From up there the estate lays itself out below in the same angular pattern: the walkways, the car park lines, the dark gaps between blocks. You finally see the design you have been inside all along. It is symmetrical, the two halves mirroring across a single central road, reaching out towards the motorway on either side like arms.

You fold the paper in half and put it in your coat. Going down, you stop counting the floors, and somehow the landings let you through on the first try.