Black brush-stroke ensō circle with a small dot and ink splatters on the left ribs, in a Japanese style.

Black ensō circle tattoo on the ribs

Japanese · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A bare torso in profile shows a large black ensō circle, a Zen-inspired brush stroke with a small dot inside and loose ink splatters around it. The stroke has a dry, textured edge with tonal variation in the black, and the skin is lit against a dark background. A hand with dark nail polish rests on the chest at the upper right of the frame.

Japanese Ribs Circle Brush stroke Dot Splatter

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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

Sit down, sit, the bench is only cold on the left side. You want the story before the stamp? Then listen, because I tell it once and the lorries are not waiting for me.

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My grandfather painted in a village above the river, where the border ran through the middle of the bridge, so he could cross to sell his paper without ever leaving his own kitchen. Every morning he drew one circle. Not two, not three. One stroke, the brush loaded so the hair stayed wet on one side and dry on the other. He said a circle drawn in one breath could not be faked, because the breath shows at the place where it ends. He never closed it. The gap was the honest part, he said, the place where a man admits he has to go back to the table and eat.

When the soldiers came to the bridge they took his brushes as evidence of something, though he never could say what. They took the paper too. He sat on the far bank with an empty jar and a single black dot on his thumb, and that was the only thing he drew for a year: the dot, touched down in the centre of nothing, then lifted.

The officer on that bank was a boy from the lowlands who could not read the scroll he was handed. My grandfather took the brush from the boy's pocket, dipped it in the river, and made one circle on the wooden rail. The boy laughed. Then he stopped laughing, because the circle did not close, and the gap at the top let the light through onto the water. Stamp it, the boy said, and let them go. Some things are only passports, and that was not one of them.