Small black dotwork tattoo of three concentric rings on the back of a hand, resting on a paint-splattered surface.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotted concentric circles on the back of a hand

Dotwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of the back of a hand with a small tattoo of three concentric rings made from separated black dots. The dots are evenly spaced and fine, giving a stippled, precise look. The hand rests on a multicoloured, paint-splattered fabric, with a second hand partly visible at the top left of the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Hand Circle Concentric circle Dot Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paint never dried the same way twice above the chandler's on Quay Street, and Nell Marrable said that was the whole point of it. She sold floor cloths that spring, each splattered with reds and greens she mixed from whatever the fishermen's wives brought up in jam jars. Every cloth got a small ring of dots in one corner, because a solid line looked to her like it had been told what to do. She dipped the blunt end of a knitting needle in ink and pressed, lifting, pressing again, leaving a breath of white between each mark.

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Her brother Tom, who bound books two doors down and had opinions about everything, said the rings looked like a gunsight. Nell told him the outer ring was the harbour wall, the middle one the lamp at the end of it, and the small empty centre was whatever a person was supposed to be steering for when the fog came in. Tom said that was nonsense, and then bought the blue cloth anyway, and asked her to dot his initials in the corner, which she refused.

The autumn the cloths went to London, a woman from a gallery in Islington wrote asking whether Nell could make the rings bigger, for a wall. Nell tried it on a spare sheet and found the dots would not hold their spacing at that size. She kept the needle and went back to the small rings, and the gallery stopped writing.

On the last evening of the season she pressed a ring onto the back of her own hand with the needle still wet from the pot, and watched the ink sink into the skin like the tide going out. Tom found her at the window with her hand held up to the lamp. He didn't say anything about gunsights.