Black linework tattoos of stacked concentric circles run down both calves of a barefoot person standing with their back to the camera.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Concentric circle tattoos on both calves

Geometric · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the backs of a person's lower legs, from the knee to the ankle, with a dark skirt or shorts hem at the top of the frame. Each calf carries a vertical column of overlapping rings and concentric circles in black ink, with the left column slightly larger and the right one more fragmented. The background is a carpeted floor and a patterned sofa, and the image is lit with a soft flash.

Geometric Calf Circle Ring Concentric circle Leg

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth knelt in the frost beside the ash stump in the top field and counted. Forty-one rings, and the innermost was no wider than a thumbprint. Her father had felled it in November, the week the pigs went to market, and he had never said why he waited so long to take it down.

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Dai came up the track on the quad bike, its headlamp still burning in the grey afternoon. "Mam wants the logs split before the snow," he said, stamping his boots on the stubble. "Don't count it, Ruth. All it'll tell you is that it's old."

She didn't argue. She walked down to the yard instead, where the water trough had skinned over in the night. Someone on the way to milking had dropped a stone the size of a hen's egg through the ice, and the cracks ran outward from it in rings, tightening towards the middle as if the trough were trying to close one eye. She crouched and laid her palm over the hole. The cold climbed through the bones of her wrist and sat there.

Dai came back with the axe and found her on the trough's edge, tracing the ice with one finger. "It's all still in there," she said. "Every year we had, going round." He didn't ask what she meant. He picked up the first log, set it on the block, and swung.