Solid black ink spiral surrounded by radiating jagged marks across the upper back, in a bold tribal-style design.

Spiral with radiating marks on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large solid black spiral sits at the centre of the design, with a ring of jagged, flame-like marks radiating outwards. The linework is bold and uniform with solid black fill, and no colour is used. The design is centred on the upper back, with the neck and shoulder blades visible at the edges of the frame.

Back Spiral Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift stopped between seven and eight, and Dev Okafor said something in Igbo that his mother would have smacked him for. He wedged the torch under his chin, pried open the emergency hatch and looked up at the grey light of the shaft, where the cables hummed like a wasp trapped in a jar. Nineteen floors of Harrow Point depended on him, and tonight the eleventh-floor lift had chosen the worst possible moment to sulk.

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The landing outside seven had been painted years ago by Mr Kowalczyk's grandson, a spiral the size of a dinner plate in gloss black, ringed with ragged marks like sparks off a grinder. The residents called it the sun. Mrs Adeyemi insisted it kept the draughts out of the stairwell, and the draughts had stayed out for twenty years, which Dev chose to treat as a fact rather than a miracle.

He climbed out onto the landing and the torch found the spiral again. Someone had been at it since he last looked. The black was fresh and tacky, gone over with a steadier hand, and the flame marks had been lengthened so they curled inward toward the centre instead of out. He ran a finger along the outer turn and it came away wet. Somewhere above him the motor clicked and fell silent.

He pressed the call button for the ground floor, and when the doors did not open he took the stairs. Each landing carried its own spiral, a little tighter than the one before, and by the time he reached the foyer he had stopped counting floors and started counting turns. When he glanced back up the stairwell, the lift was standing open and lit, waiting for someone who had not yet come down.