Black ornamental scrollwork tattoo covering the back of the neck and upper back, photographed from behind on a person with dark hair worn up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental scrollwork tattoo on neck and upper back

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical black ornamental design of scrolls, leaf-like forms and filigree panels fans out from the nape of the neck and tapers down the centre of the upper back. The linework is fine and dense, with heavier outlines defining the main shapes, and the design is entirely in black ink. The dim, moody setting and close framing from behind keep the focus on the tattoo's symmetry and detail.

Neck Back Ornament Scrollwork Filigree Foliage Back tattoo

Find an artist for this

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 Hallam Pattern-Office on the seed ship Verity held forty years of damask, every panel drawn by hand because the printers had failed in the second century of the voyage. My supervisor, Oyelaran Vos, kept her ink in a brass pot shaped like a bell and never let anyone touch her drafting table.

Keep reading

The trouble arrived on a Tuesday in a sealed tube from Deck Nine. Inside was a single folio sheet: a mirrored filigree panel fanning out from a central spine, its leaves tapering to a point. Each scroll carried a small numeral in a clerk's hand. Vos held the sheet to the lamp and said the numerals were not numbers. They were valve codes, and the valves were failing one by one, row by row, down the length of the ship.

We spent nine nights tracing it. I learned that symmetry on the Verity was never decoration. It was a promise that each half could stand in for the other if one was lost. By the sixth night my fingers ached from the fine pen, and I could read the shapes like a pulse. The leaf forms opened into channels, the filigree into filters, the spine into a main line that ran the length of the hull.

On the last night Vos carried the folio down to the lower pumps herself and matched the pattern to the pipes. The bulkhead hissed, then ran clear. She climbed back up the ladder with ink on her cheek and said the old drafters had hidden the ship's plumbing in plain sight, so that nobody would ever think to read it. I still draw that panel on the first day of each month, in black, and I have never told anyone where it goes.