Small black infinity symbol tattoo on the back of a neck, with ear piercings visible above it in a black and white photo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Infinity symbol on the back of the neck

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black infinity symbol sits on the skin at the back of the neck, just below the hairline. The lines are simple and even, with no shading, and the photo is black and white, so the ink appears as a dark outline against the skin. The framing is close and slightly angled, with dark hair at the top and a cartilage and lobe piercing visible near the ear.

Neck Infinity symbol Infinity Neck

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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 stop counting the days somewhere off the coast of Brazil, when the sea goes the colour of pewter and the Second Mate starts shaving in cold water to save the boiler. Nobody asks you to keep the chart. You keep it anyway, pencilling the noon position in a small square hand, and the line runs east for a week and then bends back on itself, as if the ship has been trying to remember something.

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The old hands call it the lazy eight. Helmsmen in the Southern Ocean zigzag through the turn of a gale, swinging the bow across the wind so the seas don't break over the stern, and the wake draws a loop on the water that looks, from the bridge, like a number lying on its side. You sketch one on the back of a telegram form while the cook argues with a sack of onions about the price of flour in Montevideo.

Halfway round the Horn the glass drops so fast the needle seems to fall off the dial. The captain asks for the true course, and you give it without looking up, because the figure is already in your head, loop after loop, each one bringing you back to the same patch of grey water with a little more of the sea behind you.

When the weather clears off Chile, you find the telegram form in your oilskin pocket, creased soft as cloth. You smooth it flat on the chart table. The two loops have run into each other at the centre, and where the pencil crosses itself the lead has pressed hard, the place you always come back to, and the ship, for once, seems to have stopped arguing with the sea.