Black ornamental blackwork tattoo of a flower, heart and scrollwork with teardrop details across the upper back and nape of the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental heart and flower on the upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of the back of a person's neck and shoulders, with dark hair pinned up. The tattoo is a symmetrical ornamental design with a large flower at the top, a central heart outlined in fine lines and solid fills, and curled scrolls on either side. Teardrop shapes and radiating hatched lines form the lower edge, and the shading is entirely black ink on pale skin.

Blackwork Back Neck Flower Heart Scrollwork Ornament Teardrop Paisley

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The collar came off the frame on Tuesday, and I have not stopped thinking about the drops along its hem. You will laugh, but Mother had me count them: thirty-one, one for every night the Hollin rock light went dark in the winter of the big storm. She stitched the heart in the middle herself, black thread on linen, the way her mother taught her in the village above the fish market. She would not let anyone touch it until it was finished.

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Father says the flower at the top is a peony, though I think it is the lamp seen from below. The curls on either side he calls waves. I have never agreed with him about anything the sea does, and I am not going to start now. But the heart is what I watched him stare at for a long time, the night before he rowed across to the mainland for the lamp oil, when he turned the collar to face the window and said nothing at all.

I am sending it to you with this letter because you were always the one who could unpick a seam without tearing the cloth. Two of the drops have pulled loose at the lower point, and I cannot get the needle through the old stitch without snapping the thread. Please come when the boat runs again, bring the good silk, and bring the pattern book from Aunt Ruth's trunk. I think there is a second heart under the first, one Mother drew in pencil and never sewed.

Yours in salt and thread, Maren