Black ink tribal ornament with swirling scrolls running down the centre of a bare back, a blackwork tattoo on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Symmetrical tribal ornament down the spine

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical tribal-style design runs down the centre of the back, built from a vertical spine of ornamental motifs with curved, sweeping arms and scrolled ends. The linework is solid black with bold and fine lines contrasting across the design. The ink is set against warm, dimly lit skin, and the head is cropped out of the frame.

Blackwork Back Tribal Ornament Swirl Scrollwork Spine Symmetrical design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shift up, you lot, and mind the lamp, it's only got so much oil in it. Now, the carver was Tobiah Frane, and he worked the winter quarters at Halstow with one good gouge and a foul temper. The Ashdown Gentle Fair had paid him to dress the centre pole of the gallopers, that great column of ash the painted horses go round. Every horse wants something to hold its place, Tobiah said, and a pole wants a spine.

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He carved it from a single length of wood, two strokes to a side, so each half mirrored the other like a face in a glass. Up top he gave it a little crown of knots, then long bodies that swept out like the arms of a dancer, and at each tip he curled the wood into a scroll so tight the gilt would not stay in the groove. The bold cuts he made by lamplight. The hairline ones he saved for dawn, when his hands had stopped shaking.

The fair came to Ashdown in September with the carving finished all but one side. Tobiah took a fever on the road and died in a caravan outside Lewes, the right arm still bare in the wood. His daughter Nell, nine years old and quick with a knife, begged the showman to let her try. He laughed, then he watched her work. She cut the spine true, a knot at a time, and never once looked at the left side for a pattern.

When the gallopers closed that autumn, the pole rode home in the back of the lorry with both arms curled, though only one was her father's. Nell kept the chisel in her apron pocket. Somewhere on the right-hand scroll, if you look close enough, there's a small knot with a notch cut crooked into it. Nell said that was her name, the only thing on the pole that was hers. Her father, I'm told, pretended not to notice it for years.