Black fine line Om symbol tattoo on the upper back between the shoulder blades, seen in a black and white photo with a white top pulled aside.

Om symbol on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A single Om symbol sits vertically on the upper back, with a small dotted line above and a short dotted trail below the main curved mark. The linework is thin and solid black, with no shading, and the tattoo is set against smooth skin. The black and white photo is taken close up, with a white top and a hand pulling the fabric to the side.

Fine line Back Om Symbol Dotted line

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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 tin came in at ten past eleven, when the reading room at the Leeds sound archive has emptied and the radiators start knocking. Inside was a single reel, labelled in blue biro: Bramley Row, 3 a.m., Dolores and the bell. Nobody on the night desk knew who Dolores was, so I took it home in my bag with the sandwiches.

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The tape was a chapel bell struck once and left to fade, and under it, if you turned the volume up until the hiss came alive, a low hum that never quite resolved. I ran it through the spectrogram in the basement lab. The screen drew a shape in pale green: a tall loop, a crescent sitting beneath it, and a thread of dots trailing off above and below, the way a pen lifts off the page. I laughed out loud, alone, at a machine. It looked as though someone had drawn the sound by hand.

I wrote to the address on the tin's back flap, a bakery on Harehills Road that shut in 1994. A woman answered at the chip shop next door. She said Dolores had sat on the wall outside every night after closing, humming with her eyes shut, and that the bell was a sound she had followed home for forty years. She said she had never let anyone copy it. Then, after a long pause and the fryer hissing behind her, she said I could have it if I brought the tin back.

So I went on a wet Thursday with the tin under my arm. The chip shop was gone and the wall was wet brick. I sat where she must have sat and played the reel on a battery deck. The bell rang out over the rooftops, the hum rose beneath it, and for once the green shape in my head matched what I heard. I left the tin on the wall, lid off, for whoever came next.