Black line drawing of a circle filled with arcs, small circles and dots in a Gallifreyan-style pattern, shown as a design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Circular Gallifreyan-style line design

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black outline circle contains a dense arrangement of interlocking arcs, full and open circles, and small solid dots. The linework is uniform and clean, with straight connecting lines running between several of the shapes. The image is plain black on white with no shading or colour.

Geometric Circle Arc Dot Line Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The cage has been stopped four days now, and Mam has taken to sitting by the range with your old boots in her lap, as if they might walk off without her. I'm writing because the post cart runs on Thursdays and I don't trust myself to say any of this across the table. Mr Garside has given me the chalk tally from the gate of the number two shaft, the one he's kept since the cutting in 1909. He says the marks are the overmen's own, a way of telling a man where his partner is working without the deputies reading it. Each ring is a seam, each dot a man, and where the lines run between them is the road back up.

I sat up with it last night and copied the lot onto the back of the rent book. There's a ring at the top with three dots tucked under its lip, and I'm fairly sure that's Dunn's gang, because he always took his pipe at the bottom landing. The open circle by the edge with two marks inside it is the pump house. The small one in the middle, the one everybody leaves alone, has four dots, and Garside says that means someone has gone past the last prop and is waiting for the air to come round.

So I have been waiting too. I've put the lamp in the front window facing the colliery road every evening since Monday, and I've stopped pretending to Mam that it's for the milkman. If you're reading this where you are, know that the lamp is lit, and that she has stopped asking me whether it's foolish.

Love, Nell