Black linework alchemy transmutation circle with three kanji characters above it, tattooed on a forearm in a geometric style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Alchemy circle and kanji on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black-ink tattoo of a circular alchemy transmutation diagram sits on the forearm, with dotted outer ring, interlocking circles, a central hexagram-like star and several alchemical symbols. Three black kanji characters sit above the circle on the upper part of the arm. The linework is bold and even with no shading or colour, and the design fills the centre of a close-up photo against a grey background and white sleeve.

Geometric Forearm Kanji

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The salt carter had been paying the toll-keeper at Kessel Gap for nine winters, and in all that time she had never once asked him what the circle was for. It was drawn in chalk on the flat stone beside her hut, rings within rings, with the little marks at the points that the carters called hen-tracks. Every spring she scrubbed it away with a broom of birch twigs. Every autumn she redrew it, slower each year, her hand shaking a little more over the centre.

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Then the snow came early, and the carter's mule went lame at the bend below the cairns, and he came up the last hundred yards leading it with his coat open. She had the lamp lit already. She didn't ask him for the toll. She asked him for the iron nails in his saddlebag, all eleven of them, and when he gave them over she set them one by one on the chalk lines at the points of the star, and then she sat down in the middle with her knees against her chest and told him to say nothing until the lamp went out.

He said nothing. The wind worked at the hut walls. Sometime before dawn the nails had gone soft and dark, and the lamp guttered, and when he looked again the stone was bare of nails and there was a small, warm loaf of bread on the chalk where the centre had been, still steaming.

She tore it in two and gave him half. "The pass takes what it's owed," she said. "Iron for bread. It's the only trade it ever honoured."