Solid black tattoo of a stylised skull with two white eyes and a spiral tail, centred on a woman's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Spiral skull on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black tattoo of a rounded skull-like form with two large white eye shapes, a small nose, and a spiral curling out from the lower right. The linework is bold with flat black fill and no visible shading. The woman is photographed from behind against a plain skin tone, with her hair tied up and a black strap top visible, and the design sits centrally on the upper back.

Back Skull Spiral

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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

The rain has been coming sideways across Kettle Yard market since the lamps went on, and you have given up trying to keep the tarpaulin taut. Your stall is wedged between a man selling secondhand accordions and a woman who sells tinned peaches with handwritten labels. Everyone else has packed up. The gutters run black with candle wax and soggy chip paper. Then something rolls in under the awning, round as a dropped bowling ball, a thin tail curling behind it like the end of a fern. Two white holes for eyes, a small nose, and it stops at the toe of your boot and looks up at you.

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"Lost property," it says, in a voice like a gate left out in the weather. "Ten minutes before the bell." You know the rules here. Nothing sells after the clock tower strikes, and nothing that arrives in the rain leaves dry. You have a green umbrella with a broken rib under the counter, and you hold it out. The creature takes it with its tail, which proves more dextrous than any hand, and opens it over its own head. Then it asks what you have lost.

You answer too quickly, take it back, then answer again. Not the keys, not the wallet. It is the habit of stopping at the end of a day to hear rain on canvas and feel that nothing needs fixing. The creature considers this, its small nose twitching. It says that is a rare thing to misplace, and that it keeps a drawer full of such things at the bottom of the hill, where the gutters run uphill and the lamps never go out.

When the bell rings, the market lights go out one by one. The creature rolls off between the stalls, the umbrella bobbing above it like a moon, and its tail leaves a shallow curl in the puddle that the rain fills and smooths over before you can look away.