Black and grey tribal geometric tattoo across a shoulder and upper back, with linework that appears pale against dark skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal patterned shoulder and upper back

Geometric · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A close, dimly lit photograph of a person's neck, shoulder and upper back, showing a large tribal-style design of spirals, curves and angular bands. The linework is bold and light against dark skin, with some shading in the surrounding skin tones. The image is almost entirely monochrome with a cool blue cast, and the design fills most of the frame.

Geometric Shoulder Back Tribal Geometric pattern Spiral Shoulder Upper back

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The net had been on the drying poles since Tuesday, and Ida Penhale had mended the same hole three times before the lamps went on along the quay. Her father's knots were still in it, a double hitch every hand's width, and the spiral she had sewn into the corner ran from the leads to the cork line like thread wound round a finger.

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Nobody in Porthkerris said where the pattern came from. Her father had said his own father drew it in wet sand with a bootheel, a coil that turned in on itself and then opened out again in bands of stepped hooks. The fishermen called it the nightwalk. They said if you tied it right, the sea would give back a light wherever the fish were thick, and most people laughed at that, except the boats that came home.

The Morwenna was four hours late when the fog came down. Ida carried the net down the slipway in the dark, and when she pulled it through the shallows the water broke out in cold blue fire, every mesh lit, and the spiral showed plain across the swell like a chart laid on black glass. She walked along the wet stones to the end of the mole and held it up.

The Morwenna came round the point at half past two, her engine knocking, following a line of light nobody else could see. Ida stood with the sea running off her wrists and counted the men aboard, all eight, before she let the net drop.