Black ink tattoo of the quadratic formula written in a handwritten style across the back of a neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Quadratic formula on the back of the neck

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of the back of a neck showing the quadratic formula, x equals negative b plus or minus the square root of b squared minus 4ac, all over 2a, in black ink. The lettering has a hand-drawn, slightly uneven line weight with no shading, and the formula sits centred just below the hairline. The skin tone is warm and the background is dark and out of focus, so the black ink stands out clearly.

Neck

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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

Mrs Okonedo had written the formula on the board every Monday for twenty-six years, and every Monday somebody at the back said it was witchcraft. Dylan Pryce said it loudest. He was the one who copied it onto the back of his own hand in biro during the fire drill, then forgot, then found it again at the kitchen sink. The letters smeared into a grey smudge that looked more like a warning than a sum.

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So in the spring he took his cousin's tattoo gun to the back of his neck, which was the one place a head teacher could not see from the front, and he did it himself in the bathroom with a torch wedged against the mirror. It took four hours and two ruined needles. The line wobbled. The square root sign went slightly off to the left, like a man leaning into a gale. He was pleased with it anyway, in the way you are pleased with anything you have made with your own hands and no permission.

On the morning of the Year Eleven exam he sat with his hair pushed forward and his chin down, hunched like a monk over a manuscript. When the paper asked him to solve x squared minus five x plus six, he did not need to think. Four hours had gone into those letters, and his spine had remembered them. He wrote the answer, checked the sign twice, and felt the ink settle under his collar like a sentence he had finally learned by heart.