Black tribal tattoo running from the upper back down the spine to the hip, shown in a black and white photo of a bare back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal tattoo down the spine

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bold tribal design of swirling, flame-like black shapes runs from the upper back across the shoulder blade and down the spine towards the hip. The solid black linework has sharp tapered points and curled ends, with smooth grey skin tones around it. The tattoo fills the left side of the frame and leads the eye diagonally down the composition, with the rest of the back left bare.

Back Tribal pattern Swirl Spine Flame

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift has been broken since Tuesday, so you take the stairs with the bag of Nan's shopping, counting landings the way she taught you, nine, ten, eleven, past the painted number someone has scratched out and written again in biro. Somewhere below, a radio is playing the same football commentary it played yesterday.

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On the fourteenth floor, Mr Okafor from flat 62 is waiting by the bins with a torch he doesn't need, because the strip light in the stairwell has been flickering since the storm. He wants you to see the crack that has opened along the wall of the lift shaft. You put your hand flat against the cold concrete and feel it breathe. Nobody from the council has come. Nobody ever does, he says, unless there is a fire, and then they come very quickly.

That is the thing about the block. Fires start on the lower floors and climb, licking up the external walls and along the balconies, and people learn to read the soot marks above the windows the way other people read tea leaves. You have been reading them all week. The black tongues on the brick below the ninth floor curl back on themselves, and you can tell which flat had the chip pan and which had the dodgy wiring.

So on Friday you climb to the roof with a tin of gloss and a brush, and you do the only thing you can think of. You paint the stairwell door red, then you paint black flames up its frame, sharp at the tips, curling round the handle, until it looks as if the whole building is alight and nobody has noticed. Mr Okafor laughs until he has to sit down on the step. Then he goes back up to flat 62 and returns with his own tin.