Black and white photo from behind of a woman with her hair up, showing a small fine line black symbol with a spiral loop tattooed on the nape of her neck.

Small spiral symbol tattoo on the nape

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair up in a loose bun is photographed from behind, one arm raised to her head. A small black fine line tattoo of a stylised symbol, with a looping spiral at the top and a curved stroke below, sits centrally on the nape of her neck. The photograph is in black and white, with soft backlight from a window and the bare upper back and black top filling the lower frame.

Fine line Neck Symbol Spiral Hair bun

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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

Sit down on the bench before the kettle boils over, because this is a tale you hear sitting, not one you read off a seed packet. Old Nan Vidler kept the back garden at Thornfield Row, and every June her sweet peas climbed the wire faster than anyone's, and she never once told them what to do. Her secret was a tune. She hummed it over the beds with her sleeves pushed up, one long note that looped round on itself the way a fiddlehead fern uncurls, then a tail that dropped down low like a runner bean hanging from its cane.

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The Reverend's wife asked her for it, and then the schoolmistress, and then a man from the railway who said he'd pay a shilling. Nan wouldn't sell it. She said a tune like that belongs to whoever is bent over the soil at dawn. So they tried to write it down themselves. Every one of them got the spiral right at the top, a neat little curl of ink, and every one of them lost the tail somewhere in the lines below, so the notes ran off the stave like water off a leaf.

Nan died the winter the orchard flooded. Nobody found a scrap of paper with her tune on it, only a row of sweet peas growing up the wrong side of the wire, tendrils wound tight in one great coil. The following spring the railway man came back with his shilling and his pencil, stood at the bottom of the garden and waited. Nothing came. But if you go quiet by the hedge in June, you can still hear the first loop of it, turning over and over in the dark like it has nowhere else to go.