Small black fine line tattoo on the neck just behind the ear of a woman with her hair in a bun, seen from behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small black linework tattoo behind the ear

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind with her hair in a loose bun, showing a small black tattoo on the skin behind her left ear and along the neck. The tattoo is an abstract design made of thin black lines, with a few curved strokes forming a compact shape. The image is in colour with a cluttered indoor background and a dangling earring visible.

Fine line Neck Abstract shape Linework

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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

Mind the step, it's loose, the whole stair is loose, like the castle's been trying to shake us off since the Dunmere lords went to the wars and never came home. Sit where the wall's warm. Now. You want the story of the swift that drew on the stones, and I'll tell it the way my father told it to me, with the wind doing the bits he couldn't.

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There was a mason's girl called Ysolde Pell who came up to Greywater every spring to mend the tower where the swifts nested. She carried a bucket of lime in one hand and a bent nail in the other, and she was the only one who ever looked up. The lord's men looked down at their boots. The swifts, you understand, came back each year to the same crack in the masonry, and every year it was a little wider, and every year Ysolde filled it.

One spring she didn't come. The swifts circled the tower four days, screaming the way they do, and on the fifth morning a pair of black wings had been scratched into the wet lime above the gap, a bird folded tight, all hook and curve, the way a swift looks when it has stopped flying and is only falling in a kind of joy. Nobody knew whose hand had done it. The lord said it was a curse. My father said it was a goodbye, and that the swifts understood it better than we did.

So they still come, a hundred years on, to a crack that was never mended, and if you stand under the north tower at dusk you'll see them dive for it, one after another, black against the sky. Ysolde's wall is still there, mind. Don't you go touching it. The lime's soft, and the bird is the only thing holding the stone together.