Black line tattoo of an alchemical transmutation circle with inscribed script, across the inner forearm, in a black and grey linework style.

Alchemical transmutation circle on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large black linework design covers the forearm, showing interlocking circles, straight radiating lines, and symbols placed around a central ring. Small script runs along the curved bands and around the inner circles. The design is in solid black ink with no shading or colour, and the photograph is taken at an angle with a striped sleeve and a metal bangle visible.

Geometric Forearm Circle Script Geometric line

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

The ewe had been dead since before light, and Dad wanted her in the skip before the lorry came, so I was drawing in the frost of the yard with a stick because the chalk had gone to powder in the cold. Grandmother's book said the circle had to be true. She had pencilled that on the flyleaf, under a list of lambing dates, and I had never known what she meant until I borrowed the compass from the tractor box and found my hand would not keep still.

Keep reading

I worked outwards from the centre the way the diagram showed. First the ring, then the straight spokes between the seven points, then the bands where the old words ran round like a line of ants. I copied those words from her page without knowing a letter of them. The water trough had a skin of ice thick enough to stand on, and the pump in the lean-to had not coughed since Tuesday.

The book said the circle takes only what is equal to what it gives. I stood in the middle with my breath smoking and thought about the cold in the pipes, and about how much warmth I had spent this month waiting for the kettle to boil. I put my bare palm flat on the frost and offered the only thing I had that could be weighed: an hour of my own heat, drawn out of me and set into the ground.

Nothing happened for so long that I felt foolish. Then the lines under my hand went soft and dark, the ice inside them melting into rings of black water. In the lean-to the pump gave one deep knock, and the water came roaring up the pipe. Dad shouted from the barn to ask who had been at the trough, and I said nobody, and kept my hand on the ground until it stopped shaking.