Close view of the back of a person's neck showing a small dotwork tattoo of six tiny coloured dots in a horizontal line at the nape.

Row of coloured dots on the neck

Dotwork · Neck · Colour · Photo

The photo shows the back of a person's neck and upper back, with dark hair falling behind and one hand raised to the side of the neck. A horizontal row of six tiny dots sits across the nape, each in a different colour, including red, orange, blue and yellow. The dots are crisp and evenly spaced against pale skin, with a soft, slightly warm light and a pink and blue knitted top at the bottom of the frame.

Dotwork Neck Dot Rainbow Neck

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Abbott kept her pins in a tin that had once held Scarborough rock, and the heads were glass, each a different colour, so nobody could mistake one for another in the dark of a hem. Ada had been her apprentice for three winters and still squinted to thread a needle by lamplight. On the Friday before the Whit fair, a bride from the terraces on Coronation Row came in with a dress the colour of weak tea and a list of worries as long as the train.

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They worked through the afternoon with the gas fire ticking. Ada knelt on the cutting-room floor and pinned the new lace by eye, the way she had been taught, six pins laid along the seam at even intervals: red, orange, blue, yellow, green, violet. The bride could watch her hem take shape in the mirror without being asked to turn. The bride cried a little, then laughed at herself for crying, and said her mother would have liked the colours.

When the bride had gone, Mrs Abbott came and stood behind Ada and looked at the row of pins for a long time. "You did that properly," she said. "Didn't stop to decide the order."

Ada took the tin home that night and kept the spare pins in a jar on the sill, where the morning light came through the glass heads and laid small coloured dots across the kitchen table, one after another, like a seam that had decided to hold.