Man seen from behind with a large black and grey skull and ornamental dotwork tattoo covering his back, plus a dark geometric motif on his upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and ornament back piece

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A shirtless man sits with his back to the camera, showing a large skull tattoo that covers most of his back. The skull is filled with fine dotwork shading and surrounded by mandala-like rosettes and ornamental patterns, with a smaller geometric motif on his upper arm. The image is black and grey, set against a wall of drawings and flash sheets in a studio.

Blackwork Dotwork Geometric Back Upper arm Skull Mandala Rosette Ornament Geometric Flower Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had pinned the drawings to the back wall of the drafting room because the light there was even, and by Thursday the sheets had curled from the damp coming off the Trent. Every rosette she drew closed on itself at eight points, the way the Jacquard cards expected. Mr Lowther wanted one that did not close. He wanted a rosette with a hollow at its heart, shaped like an eye socket, for a mourning collar ordered by a widow in Sneinton.

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She drafted it four times. Each time the dots crowded thicker toward the jaw, where the shading had to darken so the bone would read from across the room. Dots were cheaper than thread, Lowther reminded her, and the card punch did not mind how many holes it made. Ada worked by lamp until the wall was thick with mandalas, moths and one lean face she had not meant to draw, its eyes closed as if it were listening to the looms below.

The collar was finished on the Saturday. The widow came to collect it herself, held it to the window and turned it slowly in her gloved hands. She said nothing for so long that Ada began counting the dots along the hem. Then she asked whether the pattern could be run larger, for her husband's coat.

That evening Ada took the sheets down one at a time and rolled them tight. On the back of the last rosette she found she had drawn the skull's teeth in pencil without noticing, row upon row, pressing toward the edge of the paper as if they meant to bite through.