Back view of a woman in a patterned open-back dress showing a large black and grey tattoo across her upper back and spine.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Large back tattoo seen at a market

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind at an outdoor market wears a brown wide-brimmed hat and a blue and white patterned open-back dress, holding a takeaway cup. A large dark tattoo runs across her upper back and spine, with flowing, twisting lines that are hard to resolve at this image size. The ink is black and grey against tanned skin, with market stalls, tents and people visible in the background.

Back Tattoo Spine Woman Hat Dress Coffee cup

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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

The lift stops between the fourth and fifth floors again, and you hear it: a long wet drag somewhere beneath the concrete, like a rope being pulled through a bucket. Your neighbour Dolores says it is the old river. Nobody on the estate believes her, but nobody sleeps well when the rain is heavy either.

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Before the blocks went up, the Wenlow ran brown and fast along the bottom of the allotments, and it had a serpent in it, long as a barge and the colour of wet slate. The council filled the channel in 1968 and poured the foundations over its back. You know this because you read it on a plaque by the bins, and because at the Saturday market under the flyover, the man who sells secondhand brass fittings told you the serpent went looking for water and found the stairwells instead.

So you start leaving things for it. A saucer of milk on the landing, a bent spoon, a strip of blue cloth from the stall where the woman sells batik dresses. Each morning the saucer is empty and there is a dark streak on the wall above it, a curling line that climbs toward the roof hatch, as if something has pressed its spine against the plaster and slid upward.

On the last Saturday of the month you take a flask of tea to the market and sit on an upturned crate beside the coffee van. Above the tents the tower block stands grey against the sky, and if you squint you can make out the stairwell windows running up its side like scales. Somewhere under your feet the river is moving again, and for the first time in years you hear it going the right way.