Black and grey dotwork and fine line tattoo on the inner forearm, showing a rectangular panel of quartz crystals above stippled geological layers.

Crystal cluster over layered strata on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a rectangular panel with a cluster of angular quartz crystals at the top, rendered in clean black outline with some stippling on the crystal bases. Below, the crystals fade into dense dots and give way to several wavy, dotted horizontal bands that suggest sedimentary rock layers. The piece is entirely black ink in greys and blacks, set centrally on a pale inner forearm against a softly blurred background.

Dotwork Fine line Geometric Forearm Crystal Rock Stipple

Find an artist for this

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 tarpaulin over my stall at Ashby Cross had been sagging since eight, and by eleven the rain was loud enough that I couldn't hear the fishmonger shouting prices two pitches down. I kept my hands busy wrapping a split geode in yesterday's newspaper so I wouldn't have to look at the sky. Nobody comes to a rock stall in weather like this, except the ones who always do.

Keep reading

A man in a wet waxed jacket stopped by the tray of quartz points and asked whether they were real. I told him they came from a Welsh mine that shut before my father was born, which was true, and that the cluster on the top shelf had been growing in the dark for longer than anyone had been around to name it, which was my own nonsense and I enjoyed saying it. He didn't buy the crystals. He picked up a flat slab of banded grey, ran his thumb along the thin dotted lines, and asked what they were.

"Years," I said, because that's what my nan told me when I was small. "Mud settles, then sand, then the sea comes back and it all starts again. Each line is a time the world got through." He nodded slowly, as though I'd said something useful, and paid for the slab with coins that had been sitting in his pocket long enough to go damp.

When he'd gone, I stood looking at the stock: the bright points catching what little light there was, and beneath them the layers that held everything up without anyone seeing them. The rain found the lowest edge of the tarpaulin and ran off it in one thin line into the gutter, following the same path the water had taken every Saturday for as long as I'd been selling there.