Fine black linework symbol with spirals, loops and dots down the centre of a person's upper back, surrounded by green and teal watercolour splashes.

Linework symbol with green watercolour on back

Fine line · Back · Mixed · Photo

A vertical black linework design made of loops, a spiral and small dots runs down the centre of the upper back. Thin, even lines are used for the symbol, while soft green and teal watercolour washes spread behind it and fade out at the edges. The mostly plain skin around the tattoo keeps the composition focused on the centred vertical design.

Fine line Back Unalome Spiral Loop Dot Watercolour splash Symbol

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

Sit closer, the lamps are short on oil tonight, and I am too old to shout over the river. You want to know why the water in Hallow Dale runs green? Then listen. There was a dyer named Orla Penrith who lived where the stream came off the copper hills, and every morning she dipped her cloth, and every evening the cloth came up the colour of new leaves and sea glass.

Keep reading

One autumn a surveyor came up the valley with a measuring chain and a leather book. He wanted the way over the ridge, and nobody would tell him, because the old folk said the path only showed itself to those who had already wept enough to see it. So he sat on her doorstep and asked Orla, and she gave him a bowl of barley and a stub of charcoal.

She drew him a line that climbed out of the water, then curled into a spiral the way a fern uncurls, then looped back on itself seven times like a knot no sailor ever finishes. Small dots marked the places where a traveller should stop and count their breath. "That is the way," she said. "Every bend is a thing you must set down before you take the next step."

The surveyor laughed and folded the paper into his book. Years later, the story goes, a shepherd found that book in a ruined hut, and the drawing had bled blue and green from the damp, the ink running into the page until the lines were hard to find. Nobody can say whether the man ever crossed the ridge. But the dyers still say the water remembers the spiral, and that is why it runs green.