Woman seen from behind in a white lace open-back bodysuit, with a small black tattoo of a row of marks on her mid back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small black tattoo on the mid back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, sitting on a white bed in a white lace open-back bodysuit, with her face not shown. A small black tattoo made of a short row of marks or symbols sits across the mid back, with fine, mostly solid linework. The ink is black only against warm skin tones, and the soft lighting and shallow framing keep the lace and back as the focus.

Back Symbol Line Lace

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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

Ada Crofts had kept the telegraph hut on Scarrow Head for eleven winters, and in all that time nothing had come across her key that she could not read. So when the lamp on the rock began flashing a row of short strokes, each with a little hook at its tail, she assumed the fault was in the lamp.

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It was not. The strokes came again, and again, patient as a clock. She copied them into the ledger in pencil: seven marks, then a gap, then five. The Admiralty code book had no page for them. Nor did the Post Office manual, nor the list of signal flags pinned above the stove.

It was her father who solved it, though he had been dead six years. He had fished these waters and kept a tally on the inside of his cap, a stroke for each tide that turned in his favour and a hook for each wind that came round against him. She remembered him marking the peak of that cap with his thumbnail while she sat on the step eating bread. The seven strokes were seven tides. The five were five hooks of wind. Someone out on the bar had been counting the hours until the water would let them home, and had sent the count to whoever might be watching.

She sent back the one mark she was sure of, a cross, and lit the hut lamp to answer it. At first light the cutter Marigold came round the point under a reefed sail, low in the water and steady. Ada sat with her ledger open and her pencil still sharpened, and when the boat cleared the rocks she drew the hook at the end of the last line, very carefully, the way he would have done.