Black and white photo of a back covered in black linework squares, scattered and overlapping at the top and forming a neat grid across the lower back, in a geometric style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Square grid tattoo across a back

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a bare back with a large tattoo of black outlined squares. The squares are rotated and overlap densely across the upper back, then loosen into an even grid across the lower back and waist. The black linework is uniform and the image is monochrome, with the tattoo as the clear focus against the skin.

Geometric Back Square Grid Pattern Outline

Find an artist for this

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 inspector slides the box back across the steel counter and asks what is inside, and you tell him tiles, forty-eight samples wrapped in Lille newspaper, each one a glazed square the colour of weak tea. He lifts one, tilts it under the strip light, then sets it down at an angle, the way a child fans out playing cards. He has the look of a man who cannot leave a square alone, and you recognise it because your uncle had it too.

Keep reading

Your uncle laid floors in Margate for thirty years and never once started a job with a plan. He would throw the tiles down loose across the damp screed, every one skewed a few degrees, until the room looked like a spilt box of dominoes. Then he would walk the edges with his spirit level and pull them square, one row at a time, from the skirting inward, until the chaos gave up and became a grid. He said a floor is only a promise you keep with a rubber mallet. You thought it was the daftest thing you had ever heard until the day the kitchen finally sat flat under your own feet.

The inspector finds the folded drawing tucked behind the samples, a plan of a bathroom you never built, graphed in faint blue ink with the tiles numbered in pencil. He unfolds it, reads the numbers, and says it is the only honest drawing he has seen all week. Then he stamps the corner of your paperwork and waves you through.

On the far side the sky over the dunes has gone the colour of cement. You pull onto the hard shoulder, lift one tile from the box, and set it on the passenger seat, scattered, a little askew. You wait for the road to tip it over, and when it does not, you square it against the seat belt buckle with the flat of your palm.