Grey realistic tattoo of an open zip with a metal pull tab on the back of a person's neck, with dark hair tied up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Zip tattoo on the back of the neck

Realism · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph from behind shows a person with dark hair tied up, revealing the back of the neck. The tattoo depicts a metal zip partly open, with teeth, a slider and a pull tab rendered in fine shading to give a three-dimensional look. The image is in black and grey, with soft lighting and a plain background.

Realism Neck

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

Tuesday, and the Harrogate Road shop smells of hot pressing cloth again. Mrs Okafor brought in a black parka this morning with its zip jammed halfway up, the slider chewing a little curl of lining. She said her son had tried to drag it free with a bread knife. I told her I'd see what I could do, which is what I always say, and which is usually true.

Keep reading

I spent an hour with the pliers and a tin of beeswax. Zips are honest things if you let them be. The teeth are small metal shoulders that either meet or refuse, and the trouble is almost always one tooth bent a fraction out of line by somebody's impatience. You find it by running a thumb along the chain in the dark, feeling for the snag. Got it at quarter to six, eased it back with the flat nose, and the slider slid down like a drawer in a well-kept cabinet.

Mrs Okafor came back at closing and I gave her the parka. She zipped it right up to her chin, then pulled the tab down again, slowly, just to hear it. "Thirty years I've had this coat," she said, "and it has never once let me down until today." I said that was the sort of thing a zip gets to say once.

Before I locked up I sat with the tin and the pliers and thought about how many small things hold a person together without anyone noticing, until one tooth goes crooked. Then I wrote the ticket: one zip, realigned, no charge. Tomorrow the kettle, and the blue chalk, and somebody's trousers that need taking up.