Black fine line tattoo of small symbols behind a woman's ear and along the hairline, shown from behind with her hair in a bun.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small symbols tattoo behind the ear

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind, her hair pulled into a bun, with a cluster of small black tattoo marks behind her ear. The marks are tiny and simple, drawn in thin dark lines, and sit against a background of car window and seat. Her ornate heart-shaped earring and knitted cardigan are also in frame, and her face is not visible.

Fine line Neck Symbol Ear

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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 yourself down on the coal sacks, and mind the lamp, it smokes when the wind comes from the west. You want to hear about the marks. Everybody on the Wendle cut knows the marks, but nobody knows why they're so small.

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Old Hollis Price had a narrowboat called the Patience, and he chalked his tallies on the lock beams with a stub of blue chalk. Crates, sacks, barrels, every load he carried got a little stroke or a cross or a wheel. The lock-keepers thought him fussy. That summer he took on a girl called Nell, whose mother had gone into the infirmary at Stourport, and she had fingers like a sparrow's feet and no patience for slow boats. She learned the marks in a week. Within a month she was chalking them better than he could.

One night at Tenbury lock the rain came sideways and the chalk ran off the beams like milk. Hollis sat on the gunwale and told her the marks were only counting, and she said that was a poor sort of counting for a man who'd never once lost a load. He went quiet a long while. Then he took a pin from his coat, dipped it in soot, and put a mark no bigger than a seed just behind her ear. He said that was the only cargo that mattered, the one that had to get through every lock without anybody seeing it.

The Patience sank in the spring flood, and the marks on the beams washed away one by one. Nell still counts them when the water runs high, under her breath, the way other folk tell beads. Eleven strokes, a wheel, and one small star that was never cargo at all.