Pen drawing of three overlapping triangles in dotwork stippling on white paper, with a black fineliner pen lying across the page.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork stacked triangles on paper

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A small design of three overlapping triangles drawn on white paper, with the largest triangle at the front and the others stepping back behind it. The shapes are built from fine black stippled dots, with the shading becoming denser towards the solid black lower triangle. A black fineliner pen lies diagonally across the upper part of the page, and the image is shot from above.

Dotwork Geometric Triangle Geometric shape Mountain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain on the high street market had been coming sideways since six, so the stallholders gave up pretending and crowded their tables under the tarpaulins. I sold drawings from a shoebox at the end of the row: postcards of hills, each one built from dots, because a dot takes longer than a line and people will pay for the time they can see you spent. Mrs Okonedo from the fabric stall bought three on Tuesday for her grandsons, who had asked for mountains with no snow on them.

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The girl came at half eleven, soaked, a school bag held over her head like a roof. She tapped the plastic lid of my box and pointed at the triangle I always pinned at the front, the first one I draw each morning to warm my hand. Why is the bottom so black, she asked, and the top so faint? I told her the truth, which is that you press hardest where the weight sits, and mountains are mostly weight. She considered this with the seriousness of someone who had been told many things by adults that were not true.

She said the faint ones must be the far mountains, the ones you only see when the weather clears. Then she paid for the black one with coins from her blazer pocket, counting them twice, and walked off between the flapping awnings with the postcard buttoned inside her coat. I tried to draw another once she had gone, but the fineliner had dried out an hour before, and I was reduced to scratching at the card with a biro that skipped.

By closing time the rain had blurred every peak in the box into one soft grey, the dots bleeding into each other until nothing was sharp. Only the black base of the triangle the girl had taken still held its edge, a small dark shore against the wet, and I found I was glad somebody had walked away with the part that had been pressed hardest.