Black ink drawing of a vertical tribal-style design with a large central spiral and two smaller curled spirals joined by tapering lines, shown on a white background.

Vertical spiral tribal design

Black and grey · Flash

A black linework drawing of a vertical design made from a large central spiral flanked by two smaller curls at the top and bottom. Tapering lines extend from the top and bottom of the motif, giving it an elongated, symmetrical shape. The design is drawn in solid black on white paper with no shading or colour.

Spiral Swirl Curl Tribal Symmetrical design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gate was meant for Hollins Mill by Friday, and by midnight Ruth still had not closed the top curl. She stood at the anvil with the bar glowing the colour of a late sunset and tapped it with the hammer, slow, the way her father had taught her, listening for the note that meant the iron was ready to turn. The forge ticked. Outside, the canal lay black and still, and somewhere past the lock a heron complained about the cold.

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Her father had drawn every scroll on the same grubby sheet of brown paper pinned above the bellows. Two small curls that rolled back on themselves like fiddleheads, one great spiral in the middle that would never stay round no matter how she coaxed it, and then the long tails, drawn out thin as cat whiskers, which always gave the trouble. You let the iron tell you where to stop, he used to say. Ruth had never believed him. She had spent most of her life trying to make it obey.

Near one, she gave up on the top curl and started the bottom instead, which was the easier half. The metal went soft and bright under the hammer and rolled over the horn of the anvil as if it had been waiting to. She set the spiral, quenched it in the trough with a hiss that filled the shed, and held it up to the lamp. The two halves mirrored each other across the bar. Nothing was crooked.

She fitted it into the gate by hand at first light, when the mill owner's van came rattling along the towpath, and she did not look back at the forge. The tails caught the early sun. Behind her, on the shelf, the old brown paper stirred in the draught and lay flat again.