Bold black ink flourish with two curling loops and three small dots beside it, drawn on a white background as a tattoo design.

Black ink swirl with three dots

Black and grey · Flash

A single bold black stroke rises from the bottom edge and curls into a large loop at the top and a smaller spiral on the left, crossing itself at the centre. Three short dots sit in a vertical row to the right of the main line. The linework is solid and uniform with no shading, and the composition is a tall, asymmetrical figure on a plain white background.

Swirl Loop Spiral Dot Flourish Abstract

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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

Now sit down, the lot of you, and mind the wasps in the Bramley row, because this is the story of Old Tobias Crane and the bass line he could never write down. He kept bees for the Hollis orchard, and in those days the apples came down heavy by the end of August, thudding into the long grass like a drum nobody had tuned.

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Tobias had a cello with a split belly, mended with glue and red string, and he played it at the harvest supper in the barn. The parish clerk had once given him a sheet of music, all those little hooks and dots, and Tobias looked at it a long while and said the thing was a fishhook with a dream on it. Three dots after the hook, and the whole room went quiet, waiting for the low note to come.

One evening a girl called Nell Ashby came running up the orchard path, her apron full of windfalls, saying the river had taken the footbridge and her father was stuck on the far bank. Tobias did not stop to find his boots. He carried the cello down to the water's edge, set the bow on the lowest string, and played the three notes the dots had taught him, over and over, while the curl of the tune swung out across the current. The man on the far bank heard it, found the sound, and waded toward it through the shallows, one step for each dot.

They say the cello was never mended after that, and nobody minded. When the apples fall now in the Hollis orchard, you can hear them land on the beat, and if you stand still in the long grass you will catch the bottom note Tobias left behind. Mind your step on the way back, there's a windfall under that gate.