Black fine line tattoo of a circle filled with arcs, dots and script-like marks on a person's upper back, with a small star outline above it near the neck.

Circular script tattoo on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large circular tattoo sits centrally on the upper back, built from thin black outlines of overlapping arcs, dots, angular strokes and a row of small beads along the lower edge. The design resembles Gallifreyan-style circular script, and the linework is clean and even with no shading. Small outlined stars sit near the top of the frame, and the ink is black on pale skin with a plain, uncluttered background.

Fine line Geometric Back Circle Script Arc Dot Star Geometric pattern

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, and keep your hands out of the lamp oil. You've all seen the round seal on the wall of the Ferrow customs office, the one with the row of beads along its foot. Nobody in the dome reads it any more. Old Maud Ashdown could, and she taught me, and I'm telling you now because she's dead and I'm the last who owes her the favour.

Keep reading

Maud cut signs on Pell Station, where the air was rented by the hour and every wall had to earn its keep. She could write a whole letter in a single ring, the words coiling inward like a spring, so a courier could carry a sealed disc across three systems and nobody would open it but the one it was meant for. The trick lay in the beads. Count them from the gap at the top, clockwise, and you had the key. Miss one and the whole message turned to weather.

One season a boy came to her with a disc he'd been paid to carry. He'd lost the key, and the man who paid him had gone out through the lock on the last ship. The boy wanted it read before the air ran thin. Maud sat him down, counted the beads with her thumbnail, and read it aloud. It was one line: the water is under the second floor, go down slow.

The boy went down slow. He found the cistern, and beside it a child's shoe, and beyond that the man himself, who had only been hiding. Maud never said whether she'd known all along. She just tapped the bead-row with her nail and said, count from where you began, not from where you're standing.