Close side view of a person in a navy ribbed top with one arm raised, showing a very small black fine line tattoo on the upper back below the arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tiny fine line mark on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph is a close side view of a person in a navy ribbed sleeveless top and navy skirt, with one arm raised overhead. A very small, delicate black line tattoo sits on the skin of the upper back below the armpit, too small to make out its detail clearly. The soft, neutral backdrop and warm directional light keep the focus on the body and the tattoo.

Fine line Back Line drawing

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

Sit down, sit down, the band's still tuning and I've got the whole of Saturday in me. You want to know about the ribbon. Everybody wants the ribbon. It was the summer the Marine Ballroom in Hastings had its floor taken up for the damp, and they laid it new over a fortnight of rain, so every dancer that week came in with their shoes squeaking on boards that still smelled of creosote.

Keep reading

There was a girl called Edie Pask who worked the cloakroom, and she had one ribbon she wouldn't let go of, a thin navy length she tied in a small loop at the nape of her neck. She'd cut it from her mother's wedding veil. Every Thursday she danced with a boy from the lifeboat crew, Walter Coombs, who trod on her feet and apologised so often she started counting his apologies on the back of her ticket stubs.

On the last Thursday of August the power went in the middle of a quickstep. Forty couples stood still in the dark, and Edie felt the ribbon slide loose and drop. She didn't go looking for it. She stood where she was and waited for the lights, and when they came back Walter was kneeling on the new boards with the ribbon held up between two fingers, grinning like he'd landed a mackerel.

He never gave it back. Instead he had a tattooist on the pier draw the knot, no bigger than a fingernail, on his own skin, and he told her that a thing held that close couldn't be lost in the dark. Edie laughed at him for a month. Then she married him, and the ribbon went back into the drawer with the veil, and the knot stayed where he'd put it. Now, pass me that glass, and listen, because the band's starting up and Walter's still counting his apologies.