Bare back of a dark-haired person showing a thin vertical strip of swirling red, pink, blue and purple colour tattoo running from the nape down the spine.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vertical colour strip down the spine

Back · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a person with dark hair tied up, seen from behind, with a narrow vertical band of tattooed design running from the nape of the neck down the centre of the spine. The band contains flowing, marbled or swirling forms in red, pink, blue, purple and green-tinged tones, with soft edges and smooth shading. The background is a blurred wooden cabinet with small drawers and a yellow flower at the top left, and the composition is centred on the tattoo.

Back Swirl Abstract pattern Stripe

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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

Ruth had the size warming on the hotplate before I came down, and by the time the shutters went up on Cutler Lane the trough was skinned with a faint grey film she said would take the colour if I was patient. I was not patient. I had been coming to her workshop since October, sweeping up loose type and wiping the glass, and she had only let me near the paints that week.

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She showed me how the ink lay on the water like breath on a window, and how a single drop of ox gall would make it spread. The sticks of colour had to be floated in rows, never dropped. Red first, then a blue cut with a little violet, then a thread of green she called the bruise, which would sink into everything if you let it. "Don't stir," she said. "The water does the stirring."

The comb went through in one slow pull, and the colours turned over each other like rivers folding back on themselves. I laid the paper down and lifted it off the surface, and the pattern came up whole: a long ribbon of red and blue and something like oil on a puddle, every edge soft where it met the next. Ruth looked at it for a long time without speaking. Then she took the sheet from me, rolled it gently between her palms, and slid it into a shallow drawer she had labelled with my name, the first she had ever labelled for anyone.

I still have it. Eleven years on, I measure every strip I make against that one, and not one has ever come out quite so straight.