Blue and teal concentric circle tattoo with arcs running across the outer forearm, shown in a close photograph of the arm.

Blue and teal concentric circles on an arm

Geometric · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A row of overlapping circles, each built from concentric rings and short arcs, runs diagonally across the arm. The linework is bold blue with a few circles outlined in teal, and the lines are cleanly defined with some fine inner rings. The arm fills most of the frame against a soft, blurred background, with the tattoo centred and sharply focused.

Geometric Forearm Circle Concentric circle Arc Abstract Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The new lamp came up on the supply boat on Tuesday, wrapped in so much straw that Harris swore it was a pig. It is a Fresnel lens, Tom, a beehive of glass rings stacked one inside another like the ripples a stone makes when you drop it in the harbour pool. When the sun goes down and the clockwork takes hold, the whole thing turns on its bed of mercury and throws its light out across the water in one long swinging blade. You would have wept at it. I did, a bit, though I blamed the wind.

The old keeper, Ansell, showed me how to set the weights. Every eight hours the drum must be wound, and every eight hours the glass must be cleaned of salt, and between the two a man learns to count circles while he waits. There are four brass rings on the drum face and I have started tracing them in the margin of the log book, each one overlapping the last, until the page looks like a row of little moons. Ansell says it is the sign of a lonely man. I told him it was the sign of a man with nothing to do between squalls.

The storm on Thursday tore the boat's lantern clean off its hook. We found it three days later snagged in the kelp below the north ledge, its glass still whole, and I carried it up the steps under my arm like a bairn. I have hung it beside the new lens. In the evenings, with both lights going, the walls fill with rings of colour, blue on the whitewash and green on the glass, and I stand in the middle of them and feel very small and very well arranged.

Come in July if the boat runs. Bring your wife and the boy. I will show him how the weights drop.

Your brother, Alec