Five white stencil-style circular designs on a black background showing a tree, scales, clasped hands, an eye and flames, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Five circular symbol designs on black

Black and grey · Flash

Five circular white designs sit on a black background: a tree with spreading roots, a set of balance scales, two clasped hands, an eye within rings, and a flame. The motifs are drawn with crisp, high-contrast silhouettes and some spray-textured edges, in a stencil-like finish. The design is entirely black and white, arranged in a vertical column with the circles set at varying points across the frame.

Tree Root Scale Hand Eye Flame Fire Circle Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stencil knife had gone blunt by the time I reached the fifth circle, so I leaned on it harder and the card tore along the grain. Uncle Tom swore from the doorway. The back room smelt of lacquer and damp plaster, and he had run out of patience two circles ago. "Five, Ada. The council wants five by Friday, not five by Christmas."

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The job was the hoarding around the old lock keeper's cottage on the Mill Lane cut, where the boards were coming down one at a time. Tom had drawn the designs himself, in pencil on brown paper, and pinned them to the wall in a row: a tree with its roots spread like veins, a pair of scales hung from a crooked beam, two hands clasped over a pale moon, an eye ringed twice, and a flame climbing out of nothing. When I asked what they were for, he said the mayor liked things that looked like they meant something and didn't have to say what.

On Thursday night I stayed late to finish the eye. The rings were the hard part, because the card kept lifting where the spray crept under. Then I noticed faint pencil under the paper, a name traced in the margin before someone rubbed it out: Harold Quaile, 1931. The cottage had belonged to a family who kept a ledger of every boat through the gates and every debt settled on the towpath. Tom had cut these same circles onto the lock doors when I was small, and I had always thought they were just pictures.

I sprayed the flame last, in the blue light before the streetlamps caught, and the mist drifted over the water in a fine grey cloud. Nobody came to read the boards. I left the knife on the bench, still sharp where it mattered, and walked home the long way past the locks.