Fine line black tattoo of a circular Gallifreyan-style design with a bearded man's bare chest visible.

Circular Gallifreyan-style design on chest

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A circular design of thin black linework sits on the centre of a man's chest, made up of interlocking arcs, circles and dots within a bordered ring. The lines are uniform and the design is shown in black ink only, with no shading. The photograph is taken indoors against a pale wall, and the subject's beard and lower face are visible above the tattoo.

Fine line Geometric Chest Circle Geometric symbol Dot Arc

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tamsin had been copying the wheel-stone for three days before she understood that the marks did not run left to right. They curled inward from the rim, each arc a word that leaned on the one beside it, and the dots sat where a scribe would pause for breath. Her uncle had bought the stone from a carter who swore it came from the wreck of a grain barge off the Ouse. Nobody in the workshop could read it. Tamsin could not read it either, but she could draw it, and drawing was the only trade her hands had been given.

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She worked by the north window with a bone stylus and a tablet of wax, her elbow bruised from the edge of the bench. Each morning the copy seemed a little truer, and each evening it looked like a different ring altogether. Her uncle came in with the lamp, glanced at the wax, and said the market did not pay for doodles. She kept drawing.

On the fourth night the lamp guttered, and she tilted the stone towards the flame to see the cut lines better. The shadow of the rim fell across the table, and for an instant the arcs lined up into a shape she recognised: a tally of the days since the barge had gone down, counted from the rim outward, with a single dot at the centre that she had taken for a flaw.

Tamsin pressed her stylus into that dot until the wax gave way. Beside it she wrote, in plain Latin, the name of the pilot her uncle had cheated, then wrapped the stone in sacking and carried it down to the river at dawn.