Back of a woman's neck and upper back showing a black linework ornamental tattoo with scrolls and flame-like motifs, spreading down from the nape.

Ornamental black linework across neck and upper back

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows the back of a woman's neck and upper back, with a large black linework tattoo of ornamental scrolls, swirls and pointed flame-like forms. The outlines are fine and even, and the pattern narrows into a point towards the lower back. The photograph is dark with a plain brick wall behind, and the ink is the only colour in the frame.

Neck Back Ornament Scrollwork Swirl Flame Pattern Linework

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been on the tarpaulins since seven, and by eleven the gutter along Hollis Street was running brown past my trestle. Mr Okonedo's brass stall had already gone under, so I dragged my rolls of lacquered paper under my own awning and pinned them flat with jam jars. Every panel was the same: a flame that was really a leaf, curled back on itself until it forgot which way it had started.

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The first man to stop didn't look at the flames. He looked at the point, where the scrolls tightened into a single spine and stopped. "Can that be done by hand?" he asked, shaking water from his hat. I told him my grandmother drew them freehand in a ledger in Chiang Mai, years before she learned sums in English, and that she used to say a flame was only finished once it knew where it meant to end.

He bought nothing that day. At four, when the stalls were coming down and the cobbles had turned to a black mirror, he came back with a sheet of my paper folded inside his coat, its corners gone soft. He asked if I would sign the back. I wrote my grandmother's name first, then mine underneath, and the ink bled into the grain the way ink does when it has been waiting a long time to be used.