Black and grey blackwork tattoo running down the spine of a bare back, with a geometric arrowhead motif at the base.

Spinal tribal band ending in an arrowhead

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bare back is photographed from behind, with the head cropped out and both hands raised to the head. A long band of repeated diamond and rope-like patterns runs down the spine, widening into a large arrowhead motif at the lower back. The arrowhead is built from concentric stripes and dotted shading, and the greyscale photograph has soft, even studio lighting against a plain light background.

Blackwork Geometric Dotwork Back Spine Arrow Tribal pattern Diamond Back

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boatwright's daughter, Ilsa, had been told since she could walk that the sea would take what it wanted, and that a person could only ask it to be quick. So when the long-line fishermen came back from the western reef with nothing but a bent mast and two men still shouting, she did not wait on the slipway for her father. She took the old stone-handled adze from his workshop and walked out past the salt pans to the place where the cliffs dropped into the green water.

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There she found the arrow. It was a carved flint point the size of a hand, wedged in the rock where the tide had left it, and the grooves on its face ran in bands of tiny diamonds, one set rising like a rope and then another falling beside it, all the way to the point. Her grandmother used to say the island was laid out the same way: a spine of hills with the villages strung along it like knots, and at the tail of it the headland, sharp as a spearhead, pointing back out to sea.

She knelt and set the adze against the point and pressed. Nothing moved. She pressed again, thinking of the men on the reef, and the stone gave a hairline crack that ran the length of its bands like a seam unpicking. A wind came up from the west, cold and clean, and the boats in the harbour swung on their ropes all together, facing out.

By evening the two men had been brought in on the flood tide, one of them with a torn hand and the other laughing at nothing. Ilsa's father found the adze on the cliff and said nothing about it. Each morning after that, the fishermen went out steering by the headland, and each morning it stood where it had always stood, its grooves running straight down into the sea.