A back-view figure in black chalk with both arms raised overhead and the hands meeting — or nearly meeting — above the crown, the elbows bending inward so that the arms form a rounded arch above the head. The face is fully concealed: the head is tucked between the raised arms, visible only as the rounded dome of the back of the skull between the inner edges of the bent elbows. Below, the torso narrows at the waist and widens at the hip, the buttocks prominent, the legs descending to the feet at the lower margin. The body from waist to foot is drawn in the spare single-contour approach; the upper zone — the raised arms, the enclosed head, the interlocking geometry of elbows and hands — is the drawing's primary formal event.
The black chalk is applied with the bold, decisive strokes characteristic of the best black chalk works in the portfolio. The arms' interlocking geometry required multiple marks — the left arm's inner edge, the right arm's outer edge, the elbow corners — and these are drawn with overlapping lines that create the densest zone of mark-making in the upper composition. The spine's central descent from the neck to the sacrum is marked by a single interior line, and brief shadow marks at the sides of the torso give it a slight tonal depth. The feet below are given their characteristic specific toe treatment.
The overhead-arms pose has appeared in different forms across the portfolio: Work 1412 showed a single arm raised with the hand near the head; Work 1422 showed one arm raised reaching back. Here both arms are raised and bent inward, enclosing the head in a self-containing arch — the most inward and self-enclosing of the raised-arm poses. The gesture reads simultaneously as a stretch, a surrender, and a kind of self-embrace, the body forming its own protective arch above the invisible face. It connects thematically to the self-clutching gestures of Works 1405 and 1407, where the body folds inward — here the fold happens overhead rather than at the chest.
The composition's most striking quality is the transformation of the figure's upper silhouette: where most back-views produce a broad-shouldered triangular upper body, here the raised arms convert the upper silhouette into a rounded arch, the body becoming architectural — an apse rather than a triangle. On the extreme vertical 9.5"×25" strip, this arched crown above the columnar body gives the figure an almost totemic quality, the raised arms like the handles of an ancient vessel.