Close photograph of a black dotwork tattoo of a stylised shape with two pale circles, on a area of smooth skin.

Dotwork stylised shape on skin

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised shape is built entirely from black dots of varying density, with denser clusters along the top and edges and sparser stippling fading out towards the right. Two unfilled pale circles sit within the shape, and a thin unshaded line runs down the centre. The ink is black only, set against lightly toned skin in a close, slightly angled photo.

Dotwork Other Dot Circle Stippling

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had been coming in sideways across the market since six, and Dev Pallister had given up on the awning. He stood under the tin lip of the hardware stall with a brass plate on the bench, no bigger than a playing card, and a punch the size of a thimble. Every hole had to sit the same distance from the next, or the owl would come out looking drunk.

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His aunt Mavis had sold keys from this pitch for forty years and never trusted a stencil she hadn't cut by hand. She'd left him the punch, the bench, and a standing debt to the man at number nine who sold oilcloth. Dev worked the crown of the bird first, where the dots bunched tight as wet sand, then let them thin as they ran down the edges and out towards the weather, feathers dissolving into the drizzle.

A girl from the bike shop ducked in out of the wet, shaking water off her hood, and asked whether he could make something small enough for a wrist. He showed her the plate. The two bare circles where the eyes belonged, the dense cluster on top, the fading stipple to the right. She asked why the middle was left clean, that single unpunched line running straight down the brass.

Dev said that was how you kept the bird looking forward. She paid him in damp coins, grinning, and went back out into the grey. He punched one last dot at the tail, then stopped, and left the centre line alone. Rain kept hitting the tin above him until the brass went dull.