Fine line geometric tattoo of concentric black rings with red bands wrapping around the top of a shoulder.

Concentric rings on a shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A large circular tattoo of many thin concentric black lines sits over the shoulder cap, with several bands of red ink running through the rings. The rings overlap and shift in places, creating a layered, optical effect. The skin is lit softly against a dark green velvet background, and the shot is taken from the side and slightly above.

Fine line Geometric Shoulder Concentric circle Ring Circle Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every evening at six the wind came up the stairwell of Cordwell House, and every evening Ivo Brandt stood on the fourth landing to hear which way it was turning. He was the caretaker, and his mother had been caretaker before him, and she had taught him that a building breathes in rings the way a tree does, one season laid over the next.

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He kept a brass plate in the boiler room, scored with fine black circles he had cut himself with a compass and a nail. Where two circles crossed, the metal was thinner, and he had learned to lay a rag over those places. The red lines were his mother's idea. Whenever the wind ran against the grain, she had told him, you marked it in red so the next keeper would know the building was unsettled.

In the winter of the power cut, a girl from flat forty-one came down with a torch and asked why the rings never closed. Ivo told her the truth: they were not meant to close. Each one was a year that had gone round and not quite arrived back where it began, and the overlaps were the places where two years had passed through each other without touching.

She looked at the plate for a long time. Then she took the torch, climbed to the ninth floor, and opened her window. The wind came in red and ran three times round the stairwell before it lay down. Ivo marked it on the plate in the morning, and for once he did not need the rag.