Back of a woman's neck with a small black scorpio zodiac symbol tattooed at the nape, hair pulled up in a loose bun.

Scorpio zodiac symbol on the nape of the neck

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small black scorpio zodiac symbol sits centrally on the nape of the neck, seen from behind. The symbol is drawn with bold, solid black ink and a slightly calligraphic stroke. The image is in black and grey, with a soft, light background of window blinds and a patterned top below the neck.

Neck Zodiac symbol

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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 rain had got into the gatehouse again, and I was on my knees on the flags with a roll of damp paper and a tin of lamp-black, trying to take a rubbing of the keystone before the frost lifted the last of the carving. Uncle Tobias said the castle had been a wool merchant's folly before the Scots burned it, and that nobody had cut anything worth copying since. He was wrong about that, as he was about most things, and I had the proof under my palm: a small shape worked into the stone, a loop that dropped into a barbed tail, the stroke thin where the mason's chisel had skated.

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Ruined places keep their secrets in the corners nobody sweeps. I rubbed the paper carefully, the black pulling up grey and then sharp, and I thought of the letters Uncle had burned in the grate the winter before, all addressed to a Mrs Garrow in Berwick who never answered. Every envelope had a crooked mark at the top, the same as this one. I had assumed it was a doodle. Standing up, my knees cracking, I held the sheet to the thin light and saw that the tail was hollow, a channel cut deep enough to hold something small.

Inside it was a brass shim, green with age, folded into a tight square. It said only: the sting is for the ones who lock doors. I laughed out loud in the empty gatehouse, and the sound went up through the broken roof and did not come back.

I did not tell Uncle. I pinned the rubbing above the kettle, and every morning on the way past I trace the tail with one finger, the way you touch a doorframe for luck.