Four identical black line drawings of interlocking concentric circles arranged in horizontal bands, a geometric tattoo flash design with no body placement shown.

Four rows of interlocking circle designs

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows four horizontal rows of the same design, each made of overlapping circles of varying sizes with concentric rings, small dots and curved arcs. The linework is clean, uniform black on a white background, with some circles filled solid and others left as outlines. The composition is a wide band repeated four times down the page, with no shading or colour.

Geometric Circle Concentric circle Arc Dot Pattern

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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 crate arrived at Shelvey Ferry on a wet Tuesday, stamped for instruments and marked with nothing but a column of rings, one stacked above another, as though someone had drawn four gauges and then lost patience with the rest of the form. I had the stamp in one hand and a cup of tea going cold in the other when Mrs Obuya from the haulage firm leaned over my counter and said it was only watch parts, and would I please not open it.

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I opened it. Inside, wrapped in green baize, were four brass faces, each pierced with circles inside circles, small bright dots where the hour marks should be, and arcs that swept off the edge like a bead rolled down a table. No two were identical, yet laid side by side they lined up exactly, each ring meeting the next at the same point. I spent an hour with a magnifier and a school ruler and found that the dots shifted one step clockwise every time I turned a face.

The dealer who had owned them, a clockmaker named Pell, had been dead eleven years, and his sister had never sold the stock. The paperwork was short. The last line, in his cramped hand, read: set them to the same moment, then let the town do the rest. I took it for a joke until I looked up at the harbour clock through my window and saw that it had stopped at ten past three.

I did not turn the faces again. I borrowed a ladder from the lamp man, climbed to the clock above the customs gate, and set my own watch by the smallest ring. When the minute hand finally crept into line with the dots, the rain stopped mid-fall, and the gate lifted on its own.