Black geometric spine tattoo with chevron panels and dotted borders running from the neck to the lower back, with a small lion head on the left side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric spine tattoo from neck to lower back

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's bare back shows a long black tattoo that follows the spine from the nape of the neck to the lower back. It is built from chevron and triangle panels of fine parallel lines, bordered by dotted and solid edges that narrow and widen along the spine. A smaller black lion head sits on the left side near the ribs, and the image is in black ink only, photographed against a dark background.

Geometric Blackwork Back Neck Ribs Spine Geometric pattern Chevron Triangle Lion Line

Find an artist for this

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

Day 41, Wadi Ruhm. The lorry stuck again at the second cutting, so I walked the last six miles with the theodolite on my shoulder and Hadi carrying the chain. The road is meant to follow the old camel spine of the range, a single ridge of dark rock running north for two hundred miles. Nobody has ever walked it straight. The ground folds back on itself every few hundred yards, and each fold throws shadows in the same stepped pattern, triangles stacked on triangles, as if the sand had been combed. Along both edges of the ridge a dotted line of loose stones marks the crest, and the stones get closer together where the wind has scoured it.

Keep reading

Hadi says his grandmother could read a route from those folds without a compass. He lays the chain across a fan of ripples and counts aloud in Arabic, while I write the bearings in the margin of this book. Beside them I have drawn a lion's head from memory, because the rock at kilometre nineteen has a face in it and I cannot leave it off the survey. Hadi laughed at me for that. He said a surveyor who draws lions is a surveyor who wants to be lost.

Day 43. We found the spring. It sits exactly where the chevrons run out, and the water is so clear the bottom looks ruled in fine lines. I told Hadi the road will have to bend here, which is the only honest thing I have written all month. Muscat will want the straight alignment. They will get the straight alignment, and then they can drive it and see what the ridge has done to their line.