Black and white design of a braided rope ring enclosing the word caim, its definition and a small star and circle emblem, with no body placement shown.

Caim braided ring with star sigil

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a thick braided rope ring encircles a block of serif text reading caim, followed by a short definition about an invisible circle of protection. A small circular emblem with a six-pointed star, crescent moon and sun-like motifs sits in the upper right of the ring. The linework is clean and uniform, in black on a white background, with no shading.

Geometric Braid Star Crescent moon Circle Text

Find an artist for this

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

Every evening that winter, Mrs Ada Pickering walked the length of Thornley Lane with a stick of chalk in her coat pocket, and every evening the children followed at a safe distance to see what she would do next. She stopped at the mill gate, the pump house, the Methodist chapel and the Co-op doorway, and at each one she drew a ring in the air with her forefinger, slow as a clock hand, and said a word nobody in Thornley could quite catch.

Keep reading

Her grandson Frank asked her once what the word meant. She said it was old, older than the lane, and it meant a place where nothing could reach you. He asked whether it worked. She said that depended on whether you stood inside the ring when the bad weather came, and whether you believed the hand that drew it.

The winter the fog rolled off the reservoir and sat on Thornley for three weeks, the mill girls stopped walking home alone. Then Nell, Frank's little sister, went missing one Tuesday and was found at dawn asleep in the pump house, her cheek against the cold brick and her forefinger still curled into a ring. Nobody had locked her in. The door had simply failed to find her, the constable said, though he wrote something else in his notebook.

Ada took the chalk from her pocket that night and drew a ring around Nell's bed on the bare boards, the way she had drawn it on every step in the village. In the morning the chalk was scuffed on the outside where the child's heels had kicked in her sleep, and the inside was untouched. Frank, fifty years later, still sets a ring on every doorframe he passes before he goes out into the weather. He says it costs nothing, and a man should always know where he can stand.