Black and grey dotwork tattoo on a shoulder, with concentric rings of dots that grow denser near the shoulder cap and fade out across the upper arm.

Dotwork circles fading across a shoulder

Dotwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a shoulder and upper arm carrying a dotwork tattoo. Rings of solid black dots spread outward from the rounded shoulder cap, growing denser near the edge of the bone and thinning into light spacing across the arm and back. The soft, even lighting and dark background keep the focus on the dot pattern and its gradient.

Dotwork Geometric Shoulder Upper arm Dot Circle Gradient Shoulder

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 ferry only ran on Tuesdays that winter, so Dad taught me to read the water instead. He'd sit on the slipway at Skerrin with a flat grey stone in his palm and tell me to watch where it landed. The first ring was always the heaviest, a dark band that jumped out from the point of entry and knocked against the harbour wall. Then came a second, tighter and quicker, then a third, until the rings thinned into a shimmer you'd swear you'd imagined.

Keep reading

I was nine when I started counting them. Eleven on a still morning, seven when the wind got up off the Minch. Mrs Gorrie at the shop said the sea was a slow sort of writing and only the gulls and my father could read it. I laughed at her, then stopped laughing the October he went out to lift the creels and the boat came back with nobody in it, only a single stone on the thwart, dry, as if someone had set it down carefully.

After the funeral I walked down to the slipway every evening and threw one stone, the way he had. I counted the rings aloud, and I lost count somewhere past six because my throat kept closing. The children said the rings went out for ever, which was nonsense, but I didn't tell them so.

The spring I turned fourteen, a man came over with a sketchbook and asked to draw the harbour. He watched me throw and said the rings looked like a sun going down the wrong way, then looked embarrassed for saying it. I didn't tell him the last ring is always the one you cannot see, and that you keep counting anyway. I threw again, and this time I got to eleven before the light went.