Photograph of the back of a person's neck showing a red and black tribal-style swirl tattoo centred on the nape.

Red and black tribal swirl on the nape

Neck · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of the back of a person's neck, with dark hair tied in pigtails and a pink top visible below. The tattoo is a tribal-style design of interlocking black and red swirls and curled tendrils, with bold solid shapes and tapering points. Black and red ink sit against the skin, and the design is centred on the nape with the background out of focus.

Neck Swirl Abstract Curl

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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

Sit down, the lot of you, and stop passing that jug before I've got my breath back. Aye, it's a wedding, and a wedding wants a story, not another speech from the vicar's brother-in-law. Now, there was a garden wall in Penhallow that ran between the Crake place and the Tremayne orchard, and on it grew two things that had no business being friends. One was a red bryony with its curling tendrils, the other a black bramble with thorns that came to a point like a sharpened nail.

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Every spring the red vine put a curl through the gap in the stones, and every spring the black bramble put a hooked thorn back out to meet it. Old Hannah Crake used to say they were arguing, and the Tremaynes said they were courting, and the two families went to law over which of them owned the mortar. The judge was too tired to decide, so he gave them the wall to keep and sent them home. Then the great storm came in the autumn of the year the bells cracked, and it took the wall clean down into the lane.

The men came with saws and cut both plants back to the root, and nobody thought to look for them after that. But come the thaw, the red tendrils were found threading through the rubble, and the black thorns had reached across the broken stones to knot themselves in the same place, a little above the middle, where the curls turned back on themselves. Hannah's grandson said it looked like a pair of hands that had forgotten whose they were. So, you'll go and take your vows in front of the lot of us, and mind the point of that last curl, for that's where the old ones always catch.