Black and grey tribal tattoo covering the back of a man's neck and upper back, with bold chevrons, triangles and shaded panels.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal neck and upper back tattoo

Blackwork · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A large tribal design covers the nape of the neck and spreads across the upper back and shoulder blades, seen from behind. The piece uses bold solid black fills outlined with fine grey shaded panels, with chevrons, zigzag bands and triangular blocks arranged symmetrically. The image is shown in black and grey, with a plain indoor background and the subject's head and ear cropped at the top of the frame.

Blackwork Geometric Neck Back Tribal pattern Chevron Zigzag Triangle Geometric pattern Back piece

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chevrons on the bow had to point the way the swell came from, my grandmother said, so that a man could feel the sea lift the hull before he ever saw it. She handed me the adze on the third morning out of Aitutaki and told me to start on the bow board while the others slept under the sail. My palms were raw from the rope. The breadfruit wood was still damp with dew, and the first lines I cut came out crooked until I stopped watching the blade and let my wrist follow the lift of the boat.

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We were nineteen days out when the cloud closed over the stars. Tepaki, the navigator, had grown quiet the way old men do when the sky goes blank. He sat with his palm flat against the planking for most of an hour, eyes shut, while the crew watched him and the water hissed past. Then he rapped his knuckles on the zigzag band I had carved that morning and said the swell was running from the left, the way my lines leaned.

I thought he was humouring a boy. Yet at first light we raised a smudge of palms on the horizon, and the others laughed and slapped my back as though I had found the island myself. Tepaki only shrugged and went back to his mat.

I kept the adze. Years later, in my sister's house in Rarotonga, the bow board hangs above the door, its triangles worn smooth by a hundred hands. Each night I run my thumb down its chevrons before I sleep, feeling for the swell I still can't quite find.