Seated man seen from behind with a large black tribal design across his back and coloured sleeves on both upper arms and forearms.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal back piece with arm sleeves

Blackwork · Back · Mixed · Photo

A man sits cross-legged, seen from behind, with a large black tribal design covering his back from the neck to the lower spine. The bold, symmetrical linework uses solid black spirals and curves on bare skin. Both arms carry sleeve tattoos in red and grey tones, with the upper arms and forearms visible.

Blackwork Back Upper arm Forearm Tribal pattern Spiral Back piece Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The eddies off the mouth of Skerrow harbour turned the same way twice a day, and every boat coming home from the north rocks went round them like sheep round a dog. Tamsin Greer spent a whole winter drawing them in the margin of her grandfather's tide book, one spiral folding inward and its twin folding out, until the pencil wore through the paper in two places.

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In spring the cooper came to her door with a plank of ash and asked what she wanted cut into it. She said nothing. She took his chisel and worked the curves in pairs, mirrored down the middle the way the water mirrored itself at the turn, and when she had finished the plank looked like a face with its eyes half closed. The cooper said it would never hold a nail. She said that was not the point, and she fixed it across the stern of the Margaret Ann, the only boat that had not been lost since the storm year.

In October a squall came off the Ness faster than the gulls could fly ahead of it. The Margaret Ann lost her mast and her man at the helm was thrown against the rail. Tamsin's father took the tiller with a split lip and kept his eyes on the carved ash. He followed the spirals in the water as though he were reading them, letting the boat slide round each eddy in turn until the harbour wall stood up grey out of the rain. They came in with the lamps still lit and the plank blackened where the spray had hit it.

Nobody ever painted it over. Children learned to run their thumbs along the grooves before they went out to the boats, and the grooves wore smooth as river stones, while the eddies outside kept turning exactly as they always had.