Small dotwork tattoo of three dotted concentric rings in black ink on the back of a hand, resting on a grey carpet beside a pink-stringed parcel.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotted concentric circles on the back of a hand

Dotwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of three concentric rings made from single dots sits on the back of a hand, near the centre. The dots are evenly spaced in black ink, giving the rings a stitched, outlined look rather than solid lines. The pale skin, grey carpet and pink string at the bottom of the frame keep the focus on the small, centred design.

Dotwork Hand Circle Ring Concentric circle Dot Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hector Pryce came into the post office every Thursday with his brown paper parcel already tied, though he never let me see the knot. The string was always pink, bought from Gwen's haberdashery across the square, because it was the only colour she kept after the colliery closed and nobody in Carnhedra wanted anything that wasn't for a christening.

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The parcels went to Saskatoon, to his sister Olwen, who had emigrated in 1956 and sent back nothing but postcards of wheat. I asked him once what was inside. He said a circle. I thought he was being odd until one afternoon, when the bell had gone quiet, he unwrapped it on my counter: a square of card with three rings of pinpricks, each dot a needle's width from the next, the centre left bare. 'Shifts,' he said. 'Every one I came up from the Number Four without a fall. Olwen counts them. Says she can't read a ring that isn't finished.'

The last Thursday he came in grey as the flagstones and carried nothing. He asked me to post the card anyway, the one from the drawer under the till, and I weighed it with my thumb. It weighed nothing at all. He sat on the bench by the window for a long time, then said the dots were paired, one for the day he went down and one for the day he came back up, and that the middle was for whatever was still to be counted.

Olwen's reply came a month later, a postcard of wheat as always. On the back, in pencil, were three neat rings with the centre left empty, and beneath them, in her careful hand: Your turn, Mair.