Pale, lighter-than-skin scrollwork design across a bare upper back, shoulder and upper arm, shown in a studio photograph against a grey backdrop.

Pale scrollwork across a shoulder and upper arm

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bare upper back, shoulder and upper arm carry a design of pale, sweeping scrolls and flourishes that sit lighter than the surrounding skin. The linework is fine and continuous, with a few dot accents, and the curls flow from the shoulder blade down across the arm. The image is monochrome, with soft studio lighting and a dark top at the lower edge of the frame.

Back Shoulder Upper arm Scroll Swirl Flourish Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Pargeter had the gallopers stored in a barn outside Spalding, and every winter he sent the same letter about the scrollwork. The horses' flanks had gone dull, the mirrors had clouded, and the gilt flourishes running up the centre poles had flaked back to bare wood. Nobody else on the circuit could still lay a line that thin, so when the letter came Ada Tring packed her sable brushes, a jar of size and a tin of leaf, and took the night train north.

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The barn smelled of paraffin and wet sawdust. She worked by a hurricane lamp, starting at the top of the organ box where the curls met the canopy and running each one down in a single unbroken stroke, because a broken line, her mother had told her, always shows to the eye. Pargeter's boy brought tea and watched her hands. By the third night the scrolls were climbing the pole like smoke, and she had stopped thinking about the mirrors at all.

On the last night the lamp guttered while she was closing a spiral, and the stroke went wide. She sat with the brush lifted, listening to the wind worry the tarpaulin, and then she laughed, because the mistake was the only thing in the barn that looked alive. She let the wide curl stand and finished it in the same gold, so it swung out like a horse's tail at full gallop.

In the morning the gallopers were rolled out onto the frost, and the low sun caught the leaf so that every scroll flashed as the carousel turned. Pargeter paid her in cash and a slab of parkin. Ada walked to the station with the tin knocking against her coat, and she did not look back at the ride, because she knew exactly where the one crooked line was and that nobody else would ever find it.