Three views of a black dotwork tattoo on a shoulder and upper arm, with chevrons, diamonds and arched mandala bands in a geometric style.

Dotwork geometric shoulder and upper arm tattoo

Dotwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The photo shows the same shoulder and upper arm from three angles, side by side. The design uses chevron bands, diamond lattices and arched mandala-like rings, built from fine dots and solid outlines. The ink is black and grey, with shaded dotwork giving the chevrons a gradient, against a softly blurred indoor background.

Dotwork Geometric Shoulder Upper arm Chevron Diamond Mandala Arc Triangle Geometric pattern Tribal pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third step, it has gone soft like cheese. There. Sit where the wall still keeps the wind off you, and I will tell it the way my grandmother told it, which is the only honest way, because she was there and I was not.

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The keep at Carrow Lowe had seven arches over its well-court, and every one of them leaked. The rain came down the stone and ate the mortar, and the lord's mason, a man called Tobiah Penn, could not stop it. He tried lead. He tried tar. Then one wet March he sat on the wall with a bowl of pitch and a bag of sharp flints and began pricking dots into the face of the old arch, one tiny point at a time, because he said a cut line was a thing that wept, but a field of dots was a thing that held its breath.

He worked through Lent. Chevrons first, pointing down the slope so the water would have somewhere to go, then rings of little arches on the inner curve, then the diamonds that locked the whole business together. The steward climbed up each morning and asked when the roof would be dry, and each morning Tobiah showed him another row of points and said, nearly.

On the last day of the month the rain came sideways and the steward climbed up to shout at him. He found the court dry. Water ran off every pattern in sheets and pooled nowhere. Penn was asleep under the largest arch with his head on the flints.

That is why, my loves, the rain in Carrow Lowe never falls on the well.