Bare back of a woman with a long black blackwork line tattooed from the nape of the neck down the centre of the spine.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Single black line down the spine

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph from behind of a woman with her hair in a ponytail, showing her bare back and shoulder. A long, slim black line runs from the top of the neck down the centre of the spine, tapering slightly towards the lower back. The skin is smooth and softly lit against a pale background, with the tattoo as the strongest contrast in the frame.

Blackwork Back Spine Back

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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

Mr Okafor had the drawing office on the top floor of the signal works, and he gave me the job of ruling the datum line because my hand was steadiest before lunch. Nobody liked the datum. It ran the length of every sheet, the one stroke everything else had to measure from, and a single wobble would throw a points setting out by a hair, which became a derailment on paper long before it became one on the track.

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I used a Rotring pen and a steel rule that had belonged to a man who retired in 1979. The trick, he had told me, was to stop thinking about the line at all and let the pen drag its own weight. By the third week I could draw it from the top of the sheet to the bottom without lifting my eyes from the window across the yards, where a goods train was shunting coal wagons into a siding that had been grass when my father started work.

The turn came on a Thursday, when the rule slipped on the damp paper and the line tapered, thinning from the heavy end down to almost nothing. Okafor looked at it for a long time. Then he laughed and said the mistake was the honest part: real track never ran perfectly straight either, it bent with the ground and the heat. He pinned the sheet to the wall above the kettle and left it there, and I still think of it when I see a long road pulled tight over the hills, going somewhere it cannot quite see yet.