Black line drawing of a circular Gallifreyan inscription in a round frame, with the caption "We are all stories in the end" written beneath it.

Circular Gallifreyan quote design

Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a circle filled with circular Gallifreyan script, made of overlapping circles, arcs and dots. Below the circle, a caption reads "We are all stories in the end" written in the same script. The design is black on white, with a clean outline and a balanced, symmetrical composition.

Script Circle Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mason's boy stopped me on the bridge at Vell and asked what the circles on my apron were for, and I told him they were a sentence I had not finished cutting. He wanted to know how a sentence could be round. I said that was the point. You could start it anywhere and still arrive back where you began, which is more than most of us manage.

Keep reading

The commission came from Queen Irael of the Sorrowing Marches, who wanted a disc of grey slate set into the floor of her reading hall, its rings inside rings, so that no visitor could read the line without walking slowly around it. I cut dots where the vowels sat and small hooked arcs where the grief sat, and I cut the whole thing by lamplight while the rain came off the roof in sheets. Tomas, my apprentice, held the lamp and asked me each night whether the words were true yet.

The queen died in the spring, before the slate was fitted. The chamberlain had the disc turned face down and walled into the hall's new foundation, so the line I carved is still there, under the flagstones, read only by the damp. Tomas went north to work for the rope-makers. I stayed on at Vell and took in lettering for shopfronts, and I never once cut a circle without thinking of her.

Last winter the fire took the hall. Afterwards a girl from the almshouse came sifting through the ash for anything worth keeping and found a small disc I had made as a test, no bigger than a coin. She turned it in her fingers, frowning at the curves, and then she laughed and said it read like a question that answered itself. I told her that was the only kind of story worth telling.