Black and grey fine line paisley tattoo across a person's upper back, shown in a monochrome photograph with hair worn in a bun.

Paisley back piece on the upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large ornamental paisley design with dense, intricate linework covers the upper back, spreading from the shoulder blade towards the spine. The ink is solid black with fine outlines and small floral and leaf details, and the monochrome photograph shows the tattoo against a dark background. The composition centres the design on the back, with the subject's head turned away from the camera.

Fine line Back Paisley Ornament Floral Leaves

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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 pattern card reaches you on a Monday, its corners softened by the thumbs of the mill office clerk. Mrs Ardle wants the teardrop again, the one the Glasgow buyers call a pine and your mother called a bent flower. You sharpen the pencil with your knife and begin where every paisley begins, at the small curl in the centre that holds the rest of it closed, the way a fist holds a coin.

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Down at Hartley Bank the hooter has sounded for the third day running, and you can tell it from the shift bell by its length. Your father's hands were black to the wrist for thirty years, and you learned to draw by watching them mend a pit-pony harness under the lamp. So you draw slowly. Each outline becomes a row of punched holes in the Jacquard cards, and a single stray line means a shawl sold in a Newcastle shop with a gap in its heart.

When the card is finished you add what nobody asked for. Between two leaves on the lower curve, no bigger than a grain of rice, you draw a lamp with its flame pointing up, the sort the deputies wear on their helmets. Then you fill the border with tiny ferns so the lamp hides among them. Ivy, the youngest weaver, will thread it through the loom on Tuesday. She will not see it. Perhaps no one will, except whoever wears the shawl and holds it up to a window to look for the light.

On Friday the mill owner comes to collect the cards himself and holds yours against the glass. He runs his thumb along the border, frowns, and asks where the flaw is. You tell him there isn't one. He sets it down, satisfied, and you walk home past the pit gates, where the men stand in their caps watching a wheel that does not turn.