Back of a person's neck showing a tapering solid black line with a dotwork fade at the top, in blackwork and dotwork style at the nape.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tapering black line with dotwork fade on the nape

Blackwork · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A single curved line runs down from the hairline at the nape of the neck, tapering from a fine point at the top to a broader solid black stroke at the bottom. The upper section dissolves into stippled dots that fade into the skin, creating a soft gradient. The tattoo is black ink on pale skin, set against a plain, softly lit background with the subject's dark hair cropped short above it.

Blackwork Dotwork Neck Line Stripe Dot Gradient

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamplighter's boy never got to the top of Carrow Hill with his pole before the gas gave out, so every night the city had one dark stripe down its side where the lamps had not been. Old Mrs Pennock said it was the mark the town left for the things that walked after midnight, and that it was best not to cross it.

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Tobias did not believe her. He was nineteen and had been given the job because his father's knees had gone on the ladders. One wet November he carried a tin of black pitch up the hill instead of his pole, and he painted a single line from the gasworks gate down to the river, thick where the ground was flat and thin where the cobbles met the wall. Every lamp he passed afterwards seemed to lean a little towards it.

When the frost came he climbed the hill again to finish the top, and found the line had already faded there, breaking into a spatter of small dots as if the rain had been counting the stones. He stood with the tin in his hand for a long while. Below him the lamps came on one by one, all the way to the water, and the dark at the top of the hill stayed exactly where he had left it.