Black fine line geometric tattoo of stacked circles, crescents, a diamond and dots running down an upper arm, photographed in black and white.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line circles and crescents on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical column of fine black linework combines two open circles, two crescent arcs, a small diamond and a circle at the base, with dotted and tick-like marks along the central line. The lines are thin and even, and the shading is minimal, so the design reads as delicate outline work. The photograph is in greyscale, with the tattoo centred on smooth skin and a soft background.

Fine line Geometric Upper arm Circle Crescent Diamond Dot Line Arrow Geometric shape

Find an artist for this

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 wire had to hang true, or the whole contraption was worth nothing to anybody, so Ada Pell spent the first grey morning letting the brass weight settle on its thread and waiting for it to stop swinging. It came to rest on the small diamond, exactly where her father had scratched his mark forty years before, and she let out a breath she had not known she was holding. In the back room the chimney clock struck seven, a little late, as it always did.

Keep reading

Her father had built the thing from a dead instrument-maker's sketches: a plumb line strung between two oak pegs, with two open rings sliding up and down it and two crescent cut-outs that caught the light at the right hour. Along the wire ran dots and small ticks, one for each night the moon had walked past the pier. Nobody in Whitby understood it, which suited him, and so the town had stopped asking.

Mrs Hallam came in on the Thursday with her shawl pulled tight and asked when the Ellery boy's ship would be round the headland. Ada did not know, and said so. But Mrs Hallam pointed at the lower circle, which sat level with a tiny arrow tick, and insisted the instrument had shown it to her husband the year before he drowned. Ada looked at the wire for a long time. The arrow marked nothing but the waning moon, a date on a calendar of tides.

She took the pencil from the drawer, made a fresh tick beneath the arrow, and wrote the day beside it in small, careful figures, the way her father had taught her. "Ten days," she said, though she knew the numbers belonged only to the moon. Mrs Hallam nodded as if that were enough, and went out into the rain, leaving the door open behind her to the wind off the sea.