Black line drawing of a circular symbol made of arcs, circles and short strokes, with no body placement shown.

Circular line design with arcs and circles

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing inside a large circle, built from smaller circles, semicircular arcs, short straight strokes and small dot clusters. The linework is thin and uniform, with no shading. The design is drawn on a plain white background and fills the frame evenly, with a border of arcs cut into the outer ring.

Fine line Geometric Circle Arc Line Dot

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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 ballroom at the Lantern in Margate had been shut since the winter the boiler gave out, and I was the only one who still climbed the back stairs to check the damp. That Thursday I found the letter taped inside the lid of the piano, folded into a disc no bigger than a saucer. It was all circles: rings nested inside rings, bites taken out of their rims by arcs, and small dots bunched in threes like someone had stopped mid-breath.

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Mrs Ansell, who had run the hall since her husband, the pianist, died, took one look and laughed until she had to sit down. He had written his love letters that way for forty years, she said, in a script he'd invented on the back of a fare receipt, because he thought ordinary words were too easy to lose. Nobody else had ever learned it. She tapped a dot with a fingernail. "That means slow down. He always said that one twice."

I took the disc out to the sea wall and read it under the pier lamps, tracing each shape into my notebook until the ink smudged in the wind. It was a set of instructions. The largest arc marked the edge of the floor. The little circle in the centre meant a waltz, and the dots meant the count. The last shape was a ring that closed on itself with no gap, which I took to mean he had planned to keep going round.

Back in the hall I stood in the middle of the boards and counted under my breath, one two three, slow, the way the dots told me. On the third turn one plank gave a hollow knock under my heel. I knelt, worked my fingers into the gap, and lifted it. Under it lay a tin box, and on its lid, in the same looping hand, someone had drawn a circle with a single dot in the middle, waiting to be finished.