Black ink drawing of an abstract tribal-style design with a teardrop shape enclosing a ring above a looping infinity-like swirl.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Abstract ring and swoosh symbol

Black and grey · Flash

A bold black line drawing of an abstract symbol. A tapered teardrop or flame shape encloses a thick open ring, and beneath it a looping, infinity-like curve with tapering ends sits on a plain white background. The linework varies in weight with sharp tapered terminals, and the design is shown in solid black ink with no shading or colour.

Ring Teardrop Flame Swirl Infinity Symbol Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp had been out for eleven days when the new hull came round the Skerry, and I was the only one on the rock who could still climb the iron stair without stopping. Mother Oyelaran said the glass was cracked and the mantle would never seat again, so we had been burning old tallow in a cup, which smoked and stank and told no one anything.

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The ring was the problem. Every keeper since the drowning had hung a brass hoop above the flame, a thing my grandfather called the eye, and the hoop had gone green in the salt. Nobody knew why the light had to pass through a ring to reach the water. The almanac said it was for the tides. Grandfather said it was so the sea would look back. I scrubbed the brass with vinegar and sand until my knuckles split, and when I held it to the sun the shadow it threw across the bench was a perfect circle, which is not what a hoop should do.

On the twelfth night the tide ran in the figure of eight it always made off the Race, the two loops turning over each other, and the ship heard the lamp before it saw it. I climbed up with the cup of tallow in one hand and the brass eye in the other, set the ring over the flame the way the book drew it, and the light came up through it tapered and sharp as a blade. The hull swung clear of the Race. I never learned who was aboard, only that a hand lifted from the rail as they passed, and that the sea, for once, did not look back at all.