Black and grey yin yang tattoo with ornate scrollwork on the upper back of a woman with her hair tied in a ponytail.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Yin yang with swirls on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large circular yin yang symbol sits centrally on the upper back, just below the neck and between the shoulder blades. Each half is filled with fine and bold scrolling swirls and small rosette-like circles, with the dark and light halves separated by a thick black outline. The ink is black and grey on warm skin, and the subject is photographed from behind against a pale bed sheet.

Back Yin yang Swirl Scrollwork Circle Ornament Upper back

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, and mind the lamp, for the wick is cheap and so is my patience. You want to hear how the causeway gate on Inish Corran came to be split in two? Then listen. There was a smith called Old Morag Tulloch, and every gate she ever hung had iron scrolls curling out of it like ferns that had decided to be stubborn. Her two sons worked the forge with her, Ruari, who was dark as the soot on his arms, and Col, who was pale as the shell dust that got into everything.

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One winter she set them a task: forge a single disc of iron, the size of a cartwheel. Ruari blackened one face in the coal smoke and Col polished the other until it held the sky. Then the two of them spent a month working the scrolls, fine ones and bold ones, and a small rosette where every curl met the next. When it was done, she hung it on the gate and said, "Whoever holds the disc when the tide turns keeps the island." The boys both grabbed for it, and the iron, which was tired of their squabbling, split clean along its outline.

The tide came in that night faster than anyone had reckoned. The brothers were stranded on the sandbar, each clutching a half of the disc, neither daring to let go. They shouted at each other until their throats were raw, then they went quiet and started talking properly, the way brothers do only when the water is up to their knees. By dawn they had traced each other's scrolls with their fingers and found the curls had been made to meet along the edge, as though their mother had known exactly what she was doing.

The two halves still hang on the causeway gate, the black one facing the sea and the bright one facing the croft. If you go out at low water you can see the marks where the brothers set the disc down in the sand, the rosettes pressed in as neat as stamps.