Photograph of a back tattoo showing a red spine down the centre with black drips, coloured paint-like splatter and printed text across the skin, placed on the back.

Red spine and printed pages across a back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A bare back is covered from shoulders to waist with a design showing a bold red spine running down the centre. Black drips and coloured splatters in blue, green, yellow and orange spread over the skin, overlaid with lines of printed text that resemble book pages. The image is lit softly against a plain pale background, with the head cropped and turned away.

Back Spine Text Splatter Drip

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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 lake had come up over the library steps in the night, and by morning Brannoc the binder was up to his knees in the king's books, lifting them out one by one like fish. Most were ruined. The ink had lifted off the pages and run down them in long black tongues, and where the damp had touched the painted capitals, the reds and blues and yellows had bled into one another until a page looked like a field after rain.

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He was ordered to burn what could not be read. Brannoc had no wish to burn anything, so he took the one book whose spine had held and sewn the loose leaves back onto it with a length of red thread from his mother's loom. He worked through the cold weeks at the bench by the window. Each time he pushed the needle through, a line of old words came up through the wet paper and he could not make out a single one, only the shapes of letters pulled sideways like reeds in a current.

When the king came to see the pile, he found the binder asleep over the bench with the book open under his cheek. The king lifted it and held it toward the lamp. Through the thin pages the coloured runs glowed, and the broken letters lined up into sentences that had been written three hundred years before, about a river that changed course and a town that moved uphill to escape it. The king read them aloud until dawn. He did not burn the book, and in the spring the town moved uphill, as it said it should.