Large black and red tribal tattoo of spirals and wave motifs across a person's side and ribs, photographed from behind.

Tribal spiral tattoo along the ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A bare torso is shown from the side, with a large tribal design of black linework and solid fill running down the ribs. The pattern uses spirals, curling waves and triangular bands, with red and pink shading inside several sections. The background is a woven mat and a yellow and red cloth, and the head is cropped out of the frame.

Ribs Tribal pattern Spiral Wave Curve Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The track up to the Tuatea pass is steeper than your uncle said, and by the second bend your calves are burning and the bundle of barkcloth on your back has soaked through at the seams. Below, the valley is still in shadow. Above, a fern has uncurled at the edge of the path, its fronds wound tight into a spiral the same shape your aunt pressed into the margins of every cloth she ever beat. She called it the turning. She said you had to learn it with your hands before your eyes would believe it.

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Halfway up, rain comes sideways off the ridge and you shelter under an overhang where a shelf of black rock holds a carving nobody has bothered to finish. Someone began a wave here, three curls stacked like breaking water, and left the triangles for later. You trace the lines with a wet thumb. The cloth on your back carries the same pattern, the same bands of pointed teeth, though it took your aunt the whole of a wet winter to make and you have only ever carried it for other people.

When the rain thins you push on. At the top the pass opens and the whole coast lies below, grey-green and hazy, the reef white along its edge. The surf rolls in and folds over itself in long curls, and you stand there longer than you meant to, breath slowing, watching the sea draw the spiral and then rub it out and draw it again. You unbuckle the bundle, unroll the cloth against the wind, and hold one end up so the market women at the foot of the track will see the turning from a long way off.