Black tribal blackwork tattoo with a large spiral and geometric bands across a person's left side ribs and waist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal spiral tattoo on the side ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large black tribal design covers the side of the torso, centred on a spiral with bands of hooked and dotted motifs above and below it. The linework is solid black with bold, even fill, and the pattern is symmetrical in its curves rather than shaded. The photograph is taken close up in warm light, with the design filling most of the frame and a navel piercing visible at the top right.

Blackwork Ribs Tribal Spiral Geometric pattern Dot Torso

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At the school reunion in the Pell Street hall, nobody could agree on where the desks had stood in 1987, so they chalked the old classroom floor onto the parquet and argued over it until the tea urn ran dry. Dilys Crane, who had never once got her spellings right, stood at the edge of the chalk holding a biscuit in each hand and said the spiral behind the bike sheds was still there under the moss, and that her gran had walked it every Michaelmas.

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The spiral was a ring of white stones set into the field, with rows of little notches cut along the bands on either side that the children called the hooks. Gran used to say you walked it inward counting the notches, and at the centre you set down whatever you had carried in your pocket all year. The spiral kept it safe until you came back out to fetch it. Nobody believed her. Dilys had left a conker there in 1991, returned the next morning, and found only the stones and a hole where the conker had been.

So after the raffle, nine of them walked out into the dusk with their cardigans over their arms and their car keys in their fists. Dilys counted the notches aloud. At the centre Tomasz Rhys, once the quietest boy in the class and now a surveyor, knelt and set down a tin of boiled sweets, and then he did not stand up for a long moment. When they turned to walk out, the stones rose a little under their feet, the way a stair does when you have stopped expecting it.

When they went back at Easter the tin was waiting on the chalk where the teacher's desk had stood, and inside it, folded small, was the note Tomasz had written at nine years old and never been brave enough to hand in.