Black linework scrollwork tattoo with leaf-like flourishes across the upper back of a person with short platinum blonde hair, photographed from behind.

Symmetrical scrollwork tattoo across upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph from behind shows a large, symmetrical tattoo of fine black scrollwork and leaf-like foliage spreading across the upper back between the shoulder blades. The thin, even linework forms curls, spirals and a central ornamental stem that tapers down the spine. The design is in black ink on pale skin, with a plain, dark background and a few small studs visible at the nape of the neck.

Fine line Botanical Back Scrollwork Foliage Swirl Ornament Leaves Filigree

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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 gouge is too wide for the curl you need, and Mr Pardoe tells you so without looking up from the taffrail he is planing on the afterdeck. Off the Cape the sea has gone the colour of wet slate, and the ship lifts and drops under your knees as you kneel on the boards with a pencil behind your ear. He has drawn the design on brown paper for you already: a stem running up the middle, then leaves breaking off it in pairs, each one turning back on itself like a fern unrolling in a Kent hedge bottom.

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"Every scroll wants a centre," he says. "Find the centre and the rest will follow it." You spend three days on a single spiral. The first attempt splits along the grain and the second cuts too deep, so the leaf looks as though it has been struck. On the fourth morning the trades come up steady and the porpoises run alongside, and your hand stops shaking long enough to follow the pencil line to its tail. The curl closes cleanly. Pardoe runs a thumb over it, grunts, and says nothing, which from him is praise.

Later, when the lamps are lit in the steerage and the bulkhead creaks with every swell, you lay the brown paper against the wood and trace the whole pattern again in soft lead. Two halves meet down the middle like a pair of hands that have forgotten how to part. At the bottom the stem tapers to a single tight whorl, the last thing you will cut before the ship makes Fremantle, and you sign it with your initials where nobody will look unless they know to.