Black linework circles inside a ring with a blue and purple watercolour wash, tattooed on the inner forearm.

Circle glyph tattoo on forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a tattoo on the inner forearm showing a large outlined ring containing three smaller circles, each with short inner lines and marks. The linework is fine and black, while the background of the ring is filled with soft, blended blue and purple wash that fades at the edges. The design sits centrally on the arm against a patterned dark fabric and a purple carpet.

Geometric Forearm Circle Ring Glyph 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

The ferry left me on Skerrow with a crate of ink and a letter from my aunt, the only thing she ever sent me that wasn't a complaint. She had spent forty years copying the rings carved into the lintel of the old drying shed, three circles held inside a larger one, each circle split by a line that ran off at a slant like a thread someone had forgotten to pull tight. Nobody on the island could read them. The minister called them weather marks. The postmistress said they were the same shape as the fishing floats her grandfather painted, and that was a better guess than most.

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I spent the first week sitting on the shed step with a notebook, drawing the rings over and over until my hand knew the difference between a line that touched a circle and a line that only pointed at it. On the eighth morning I noticed the largest circle moved. Not the stone, the reading of it. Turn the page sideways and the small circle on the left sat inside the middle one, which sat inside the rim, and the slanting line became a count. One, then a gap, then two.

On the ninth day the tide was out and the wrack lay in rows across the sand, and I walked out to the point with my notebook, counting the gaps in the rocks. Three piles of stones, each with a ring scratched on top. I read them as my aunt would have, left to right, and they said her name, then the year she came, then a single word I still can't translate, which I have decided means stay.

I stayed. The ink is still in the crate.