Large black tribal-style back tattoo with bold geometric bands and circular motifs, shown on a woman's bare back seen from behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal back tattoo with circular motifs

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind, with her face not visible, displays a large tribal-style tattoo covering her upper and mid back in a broad triangular shape. The design uses solid black ink with bold bands of geometric patterns, scalloped edges and three circular motifs, one of them with a radiating centre. The dark background and soft studio lighting keep the focus on the black linework and the skin around it.

Blackwork Back Tribal pattern Geometric pattern Circle Mandala Triangle Woman Back tattoo

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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

Sit down by the bean rows where the shade falls, and mind the marrow leaves. This is the story of Ada Penhallow, who kept the walled garden behind the salt house on Morrow Keel, where nothing grew unless she asked it twice.

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Each spring the sea wind came over the wall carrying seeds nobody had planted, and each spring Ada pressed them into the earth with her thumb, one at a time, in three rings. The first ring was for the rain and the second for the sun. The third was for whatever came back across the water when the boats were late. She had drawn the pattern on the whitewash with a burnt stick: a broad band across the top, a point running down toward the ground, and round discs set in the middle like the eyes of a patient animal.

One autumn the boats were very late. The harbour master's boy came up the path saying the Gannet had not come home, and Ada went straight to the wall, knelt where the third ring should be, and pulled every weed she could find. She did not sleep. At first light she heard oars knocking against the rocks, and the Gannet came round the point with her sail torn and her crew thin but breathing, carrying a crate of salt-stained seed they swore had come from no field at all.

Ada planted it in the third ring that same morning, and the seed opened white by the next dusk. That is why, if you walk the wall when the lamps are lit, you will see the circles closing one by one, like eyes deciding whether to sleep. Now pass me that jug, and mind the bees.