Black and grey fine line ornamental swirl tattoo with dotted detail, running down the side of a person's back.

Ornamental swirl tattoo on the side of the back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A flowing, ornamental design of scrolls, feather-like plumes and paisley shapes sits diagonally across the side of the back, narrowing towards the waist. The linework is fine and dark, with stippled dots along the edges and light shading within the plumes. The image is black and grey, shot close on bare skin against a dark background.

Fine line Dotwork Back Swirl Scrollwork Paisley Feather Ornament Plume

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barge Marigold had carried coal up the Ouse for thirty years, and in all that time old Tobias Penrose had never once let a child steer her. So when the rain came sideways off the Humber and the tiller slipped from his hand, it was his granddaughter Edie who reached for it, and it was Edie who found the current wanted her to lean.

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She leaned. The bow swung clear of the sunken piling and the reeds parted like a curtain, and beyond them lay a backwater nobody on the river had ever mentioned. The water there ran in loops. It curled back on itself, spilled into little whorls, and sent out thin green tendrils that twisted and unwound along the banks. Tobias said afterwards that the fern-shaped weed had been feathers once, plucked from a heron that wanted to be a ship, and that the whorls were where it had tried to fly and got tangled in its own wake.

Edie did not believe him, but she kept the tiller steady all the way down to the lock, and when the keeper asked how a girl of eleven had brought a barge through the Ouse in a blow, she only pointed at the wake behind them. It ran in a long dark scroll, feathered at its edges, narrowing to a fine point at the stern, and it did not fade for three days.

Tobias never told her what the backwater was. He only started leaving the tiller to her on Tuesdays, and on the first Tuesday of every month he poured a cup of tea into the river and watched the steam curl off it into shapes he claimed he could read.