Black tribal tattoo of sweeping bands across a bare shoulder and upper back, in a blackwork style.

Tribal band tattoo on shoulder and back

Blackwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black tribal design of tapering curved bands runs from the top of the shoulder down over the shoulder blade. The linework is solid and uniform, with no shading, and the bands narrow to sharp points at their ends. The ink is black against warm skin, and the photo is framed closely on the upper back and shoulder with a plain grey background.

Blackwork Shoulder Back Tribal Band Swirl Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart table in the Skerrie boathouse had been Ada's for thirty years, and the pencil lines across it were hers too. She drew the tide races the way her father had taught her, not as numbers but as bands, long strokes that swelled where the water ran hard and tapered to a point where it gave up and turned back on itself. The men on the slip called them the sheep's teeth. Ada called them the lanes, and she would not let anyone take the lifeboat past a lane she had not inked herself.

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The winter the damp got into the old tables and the paper went to pulp, the crew wanted her to copy the lanes from memory. She refused. In the first flat calm of March she took the Mary Ellen out with her nephew Tam at the tiller, a weighted line in one hand and a stopwatch on a string around her neck, and she sounded every race until her fingers were blue. Tam complained about the cold for six hours and then stopped complaining, because the water was doing something he had never seen it do.

At the Gannet stream the current was not where the old chart put it. The band had shifted a cable east, and its point ran out toward the rocks where the trawler Ellen Rose had been fishing for her nets. Ada wrote the new line on the back of a tide card and said nothing until they were tied up. That night a call came in from the coastguard, the wind rising, and the lifeboat went out by the new lane and reached the trawler with ten minutes to spare.

Next morning Ada laid fresh paper over the table, weighted the corners with river stones, and drew the Gannet band again, slower this time. When she came to its point she lifted the pencil and left it sharp, as it always was, and set the kettle on the stove.