Solid black silhouette of a dancing woman framed by pink ribbon swirls, tattooed across a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Silhouette dancer with pink ribbons on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a solid black silhouette of a female figure in a dynamic pose, with one leg bent and arms raised. Several pink ribbon-like swirls loop around the figure in curved, flowing lines. The black fill is flat and dense, while the pink ribbons have soft shading and lighter highlights, and the design is centred on the upper back.

Back Silhouette Woman Dancer Ribbon Swirl

Find an artist for this

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 ribbons were the last of the silk from the Halloran theatre, pink as the inside of a shell, and Maud had knotted them to the iron balconies of Tanner's Row so she could dance above the gaslamps where the bakers' carts could not reach. Nobody in the city below looked up after midnight. That was the point of her.

Keep reading

One night a man in a grey coat stood under the lamp at the corner and watched her shadow instead of her. It was thrown long across the brick, black and sharp, and he said the shadow was worth more than the woman, because a shadow could be sold to the clockmaker who wanted something that never tired. Maud laughed and kept dancing. He offered coins, then a ticket to Lisbon, then a promise that her mother's debts would be paid.

She stopped only when the silk was wound round her wrists. Then she did the thing her grandmother had taught her, the high kick and the slow turn that drags a ribbon through the air like a river. The shadow did not follow her. It stayed on the wall, bent and dark, reaching for the man's collar, and the ribbons looped around it until he stumbled backwards into the gutter.

By morning the lamp was out and the wall was clean. Maud walked home with her own shadow pinned flat at her heels, obedient for once, and she never once looked back to see whether the other one was still dancing.