Photograph of a large multicoloured tribal-style tattoo running down a person's back along the spine, with black, red, green, yellow and blue sections.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Multicoloured tribal design down a back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A bare back, cropped at the neck and waist, shows a long tattoo of stylised tribal swirls and abstract creature shapes running down the spine. The linework is bold and black, with flowing curls, flame-like tails and pointed forms. Red, yellow, green and blue fills sit alongside solid black areas, and the design is spread across the full height of the back.

Back Tribal Swirl Flame Creature Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paint came in tins that had once held Gran's marmalade, and by March the whole yard smelled of linseed and tar. Grandad worked the bows of the six boats in the order they came off the slip: red for the Ellen May, green for the Hope, yellow for the little Dove that never went past the headland. He said the creatures had to be drawn in one stroke, or the sea would notice the hesitation and take it out on whoever was aboard.

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I was twelve the spring the blue ran short. Grandad had mixed it from an ink bottle his brother left behind, and it went thin, so the tail of the last creature on the Dove wandered off the line and curled back on itself like a wave changing its mind. He wanted to scrape it and start again. I told him to leave it. I had held the lamp for him all week and felt I had earned one mistake of my own. Nobody on the quay would see the keel anyway, only the flames climbing the bow.

In October a squall came down off the north side and the fleet scattered. The Ellen May and the Hope limped in before dark. The Dove did not come in at all, and we stood on the wall with our collars up until the lamps at the end of the pier were the only colour left in the world. Then a single engine coughed out past the rocks, and there was the Dove, low in the water, her blue tail the first thing the torch found.

Grandad put his hand flat on that wandering curl and said it was the only honest line on the boat. I still think he was being kind. The Dove has been in every winter since, and every spring I touch up the tail myself, leaving it exactly as wrong as it was.