Close-up of a woman's arm with black and grey geometric and dotwork tattoos on the upper arm and forearm, wearing a white t-shirt and denim dungarees.

Blackwork and dotwork arm tattoos under denim dungarees

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a woman from the chest down wearing denim dungarees, a white t-shirt and a black crossbody bag, with one arm visible. Black ink tattoos cover the upper arm and forearm, including a mandala-like floral motif, triangular geometric shapes and fine dotted ornamental bands. The shading is in black and grey with a soft, natural outdoor light and a blurred street background.

Geometric Dotwork Upper arm Forearm Mandala Floral Triangle Geometric pattern Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at the Fenwick Road reunion remembered that Mr Garside's compass had a bent leg, so I brought it back in my handbag, wrapped in an old school tie. The hall smelled of floor polish and the same squash served at the Christmas fair in 1994. Dee Harrington was still drawing circles in the air when she talked, as though the room were a blackboard waiting for her proof.

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We had been the set that sat at the back of double geometry, the ones who drew rosettes in the margins instead of solving for x. Mr Garside walked the rows tapping each page with the end of his ruler. "Symmetry is only tidiness that has been thought about," he said once, and Dee copied it onto her pencil case in biro and got a detention for it.

Later, by the trestle table with the raffle tickets, I found an old exercise book in a box of memorabilia someone had dragged out of the caretaker's cupboard. Page after page of eight-petalled flowers, triangles nested inside triangles, and along the edges a band of tiny dots that, when you counted them, always came to a multiple of nine. Dee had pressed so hard in one centre that the pencil had torn the paper through.

I sat on a radiator and traced one design with my finger, starting from the middle, and found that every line had been placed to lead back to where it began. We had never once finished a page. I put the compass in the box beside the exercise book and told Dee I'd keep it safe. She laughed and said nobody had needed a compass since 1996.