Back of a person with a blurred watercolour tattoo in green and grey shading over a thin black line running down the spine.

Watercolour spine line on a back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A bare back viewed from behind, with a thin black line running down the spine. Above the shoulder blades, soft green, teal and grey washes spread outward in a diffuse, smoky shape. The background shows orange and grey stripes, and a pink garment is held across the sides of the body.

Back Spine Line Abstract shape Watercolour Smoke

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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

Mind the gap, you say, and I'm telling you now, the gap is the whole of it. Sit down, shift your bag off that bench, the bench has held worse. Right. Old Tamsin kept the signal box at Gallow Bridge, and she could see the whole valley from her window, the single track running down through the willows to the sea.

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Every night at eleven the goods train came through with no lamps lit, pulling three wagons and a tender that smoked green from a coal the miners swore was never dug. Nobody ever saw its driver. Tamsin wrote the times in her ledger in pencil, and every night the pencil went blunt before the train did.

One autumn the line was swallowed by a fog that tasted of copper. The points froze. A boy from the lamp-room came up the steps with a lantern and said the rails were humming, humming like a wire with the storm on it. Tamsin took the black ink from the drawer, the ink she used for the closing notices, and she drew a single unbroken line down the centre of the ledger page, rail to rail. Now you can follow it home, she said, and she shut the book.

The train came through that night on her line and nowhere else, and the steam went up above the bridge in a long soft cloud, and the cloud carried on the wind until it was gone. That was the last anyone saw of the goods train, or of the boy, or of the ink. The signal box stands empty now. Its ledger is still on the sill, and the line through the page still runs straight, as if somebody is still on it.