Fine line black tattoo of a circle enclosing geometric lines, arcs and dots, on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Fine line circle and geometric design on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single black fine line tattoo sits on the inner forearm, enclosed in a thin circle. Inside, straight diagonal lines, arcs and several small circles and dots form an abstract, mechanical looking design. The thin, even linework is in black ink only, and the subject is shown against a plain pale background with the wrist and hand visible at the top of the frame.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Circle Geometric line Arc Dot

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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 last cart of the harvest had not reached the mill when the bailiff came up the lane asking for the scribe's wheel. Nobody in Thorne Bottom had ever seen the wheel. They knew only that Aldous Quarrie, who kept the tithe rolls, wrote every debt in a ring the size of a cartwheel rim, and that the bailiff could read none of it.

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The ring had three straight roads drawn across it, slanting from the rim to the centre like spokes that had lost their wheel. Where the roads crossed, Quarrie set small circles, one for each sack owed, and dots for the grain spilled on the way. Arcs bent around them to say who had carried it and who had sworn to it. A child could copy the shapes. No one else could say which way round to read them.

The bailiff waited three days in the inn yard while Quarrie sat over the ring with a pair of dividers, not writing, only turning the page slowly until the roads lined up with the mill's shadow at noon. On the third morning he laid the paper on the bailiff's knee and tapped one dot.

"That is your own name," he said. "Read it from the centre out and you will find you have paid already."

The bailiff counted the circles twice and went home without the sacks. Quarrie kept the ring pinned above his door, where the shadow of the mill still falls across it at noon, and where the children of Thorne Bottom still go to be shown how to read it backwards.