Blackwork tattoo of solid black circles of varying sizes running down the centre of a person's back along the spine.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vertical row of solid black circles on a back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a vertical column of solid black filled circles that follows the spine from the neck to the lower back. The circles range from very small at the top to one large circle near the middle, with a few medium sizes between them. The ink is uniformly black with crisp edges against the skin, and the bare back fills the frame against a dark background.

Blackwork Geometric Back Circle Dot Spine Column

Find an artist for this

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 surveyor's map pinned above our kitchen table showed the desert road as a line of ink dots, one for each well, and Dad said you could tell how far you had come by counting them backwards. Nine from the coast, the smallest first, then the great round one at Halfway where the bore never gave out. I learnt their names before my times tables: Tinder, Sheep Ear, Corrie's Tank, Blue Hollow. Each had a sound of its own when you dropped a weight down the shaft and listened.

Keep reading

The summer I was sixteen, the Bedford's radiator split at Sheep Ear and I was left with a dented jerrycan, a sack of tinned peaches and the rest of the road. I walked it the way Dad had taught me, reading the wells off in order, the stones under my boots coming up in the gravel like beads on a cord. By the fourth well my tongue had gone to leather. By the sixth I had stopped counting out loud, which was the first thing he had warned me against.

Halfway looked dry when I reached the lip of it at dusk. The wind had pulled the rope tight across the wooden cover, and when I finally got it open, the water stood black and perfectly still, holding the last of the light like a coin. I did not drink straight away. I sat with the jerrycan between my knees and listened, the way he had, until the shaft gave back the small clean knock of a stone meeting water.

I drank from my cupped hands, filled the can, and walked the last nine miles by starlight, saying the names aloud now, all of them, the small ones first. At the coast I took the surveyor's pencil from the glovebox and drew a fresh dot beside Halfway, a little larger than the rest, and left the map unpinned on the table for Dad to find.