Black and grey photograph of a person's bare back showing a large tribal-style blackwork ornament on the lower back and a small flower tattoo on the upper shoulder.

Tribal lower back piece with small flower on shoulder

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a person seen from behind with dreadlocks, a white cloth draped over the hips and a large symmetrical tribal ornament across the lower back. The ornament uses bold solid black linework with swirling and geometric motifs, and two small flower shapes sit either side of it. A smaller black flower tattoo appears on the upper shoulder, and the image is in black and white with soft, even lighting.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Mattis carved the panel for the fairground's lead wagon the winter the river froze to the bottom. He worked it from a single plank of ash, cutting a diamond with its points set to the four winds, and inside the diamond he set a ring of swirling tendrils that no one else in the fair could follow with their eyes. In the centre he left an oval the size of a hen's egg, and in that oval he cut a sleeping sun with its face turned down.

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The fair had come in from the east that year with eleven wagons, a bear that could count to nine, and a girl named Ilse who walked the high wire without a pole. Ilse liked to say the diamond was the only thing on the wagon that told the truth, because it pointed the same way whether the road turned or not. Mattis said nothing, but he carved two small flowers either side of the ornament, each with six petals, so the wagon would have something to smile with when the lamps went out.

When the thaw came, the wagons would not move. The axles had split in the frost and the bear had eaten the harness. Ilse climbed onto the roof of the lead wagon at dusk, laid her palm on the carved sun, and found the oval warm. She pressed harder. The wood gave a click and the sun swung open like a little door, and inside was a folded map of roads nobody had travelled since the fair was young. By morning the wagons were rolling again, pointed at the first road on it.

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