Close-up of a black blackwork tattoo of three stacked yin yang style symbols with two small dots below, on a person's upper back between the shoulder blades.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stacked yin yang symbols on the upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a full yin yang symbol at the top, followed by a smaller partial yin yang and a tiny circle, with two dots beneath them in a descending column. The symbols are filled with solid black ink and fine outlines, with the smallest elements reduced to simple dots. The photograph is taken from behind, centred on the upper back with dark hair and black shoulder straps visible at the edges.

Blackwork Geometric Back Yin yang Circle Dot Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mairi had counted the light for eleven nights before she told anyone the relief boat was late. The Skerry Rock lamp flashed its group every fifteen seconds, and the logbook on the tin desk wanted the interval written in pencil, not kept in her head. Her uncle had taught her to trust the paper. The paper did not get seasick.

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On the twelfth night the sea went flat and black as slate, and fog came in so thick the foghorn sounded like a cow lost in a field. She climbed the spiral stairs with a torch in her teeth and found the lens already turning, its prisms throwing long white bars across the water. Salt had crusted the lower glass in small round spots, the way frost makes lace on a window, and she had to scrape them with her thumbnail before the beam would carry.

She sat on the cold step and drew what she was seeing in the margin of the log: a whole circle, half of it filled in, then a smaller broken one beneath, then a single dot, then two. It looked like a sentence that had run out of breath. Her uncle would have called it foolishness and sent her down to peel potatoes.

At dawn the fog lifted and the relief boat came round the point with a grey hull and a man waving his cap. Mairi held the page up for him to read. He squinted, then laughed, and tapped the two dots with a blunt finger. "That's the tide," he said. "Spring, then turning, then slack water, then the ebb. You've drawn the whole night out for me." She looked at the little column again and found, for the first time, that she had not been counting the light at all, only waiting for it to finish.