Back view of a woman with a black ornamental blackwork tattoo spreading from the nape of the neck down the upper back.

Ornamental neck and upper back tattoo

Blackwork · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, showing a symmetrical black ornamental design that covers the back of the neck and tapers down between the shoulder blades into a point. The design is built from fine, dense outlines of scrolls, curls and pointed leaf-like forms, with no solid shading. The ink is black on pale skin against a dark, dimly lit background with a framed picture on the wall.

Blackwork Neck Back Ornamental pattern Scroll Curl Symmetrical design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Calder House has been broken since March, so I climb to the fourteenth floor with a sack of my dad's drawings over one shoulder. The stairwell smells of bleach and somebody's Sunday chips. The housing association says the balcony railings are coming out, every one, to be replaced with flat grey panels nobody can climb or hang washing over.

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Dad was a smith at the Rawlings foundry until they shut it in 1987. He made gates for St Anne's cemetery, and the fern-scroll pattern he drew for them is still in this sack, pinned between tracing paper gone the colour of weak tea. Each leaf curls back on itself and tapers to a point, mirrored down the middle as neatly as a hymn book. He drew the same pattern for our own balcony and never made it. The council would not pay, so he kept the drawing on the kitchen wall for twenty years anyway.

On the fourteenth floor I find Mrs Adeyemi-Hart at her open door, sweeping dead geraniums off the step. I ask if I can take a rubbing of her railing before the men come on Monday. She looks at the sack, then at me, and says she has lived behind that rail since 1971 and never once leaned on it without thinking of her husband's hands on the bars. Then she hands me a pencil and tells me to start with the top scroll, because that is where the sun comes in.

I work until the light goes orange over the car park. The rubbings come up pale and ghostly, every curl exactly where Dad set it down. When I stand back, the old iron seems to lean out over the drop like something reaching for the ground. I fold the paper along the central line so the two halves meet perfectly, then press my palm flat over the fold and hold it there until the warmth of my hand has gone into the paper.