Two black and grey forearm tattoos: an eye within a triangle of radiating lines on the left, and a geometric eye with dotwork and a shaded cube on the right.

Eye in triangle and geometric forearm tattoos

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A split image showing two forearm tattoos. The left shows a shaded eye inside a triangle of fine radiating lines, with a flower of life pattern above it. The right shows an eye set within an overlapping triangular lattice, with dotted lines and a stippled cube at the base. Both are black and grey, with precise linework and dotwork shading.

Geometric Dotwork Forearm Eye Triangle Flower of life Cube Radiating lines

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cube had come loose from the trailer again by the time we reached Ferrybridge, and Mrs Dacre stood over it in her wellies as if it had personally insulted her mother. It was a solid thing, dense as a bollard, painted the grey of wet slate, and it sat at the bottom of the lattice frame where the big top's geometry was meant to begin. Every season she made us build the same thing: a triangle of steel tubing, webbed with smaller triangles, rings bolted at the corners, and at its centre a painted eye that opened when the lamps came on.

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Her husband had painted the eye, a grey and careful thing shaded with a thousand dots, and he had insisted the lines radiating from it were counted, not drawn. Nineteen years on, I still counted them while I worked, sliding the last bolt through the corner ring while the generator coughed behind the dodgems. The disc of overlapping circles she called the flower hung on the rear canvas, and the children liked to stand under it and try to find the one petal that wasn't joined to the rest.

On the Thursday she asked me to climb inside the frame and sit where the eye looked out. I said the scaffold would not hold a grown man, and she said it had held her husband for a whole summer. So I sat with my back to the steel while the lamp behind the painted pupil flickered on. Through the dots I could see the whole field, the candyfloss queue, the boy with the broken kite, the rain coming in sideways over the car park, all laid out in a neat triangle as if someone had measured it.

When I climbed down she had already pushed the cube back into its socket and was wiping her hands on a rag. Now you know why it has to be heavy, she said. Something has to stay where it is. Then she switched off the lamp, the eye went dark, and the gears of the Ferris wheel began to turn over the town.