Black linework tattoo of overlapping circles with Gallifreyan-style script and dots, running down the inside of a forearm.

Gallifreyan circles on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two overlapping circular designs of Gallifreyan-style script, with small dots and arcs, run down the forearm, with a third partial circle lower down. The linework is solid black and uniform, with dots filled in solid black and no shading. The skin is pale and the background is a plain purple wall, and the composition is a close, straight-on view of the forearm.

Geometric Forearm Circle Dot Arc Linework

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third plate came back from the foundry with a hairline crack running through its middle ring, and Mr Pell would not let anyone else touch it. He sat at the bench with his spectacles pushed up into his hair and turned the brass under the lamp, murmuring the dots and arcs the way my grandmother murmured her beads.

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Nobody in Gannet Hythe could read the script on those dials, not even the vicar. Mr Pell had learned it from a tin trunk of papers his brother carried off a Norwegian timber ship in 1911, and he kept most of it in his head rather than on paper. Each ring stood for a day, each dot for an hour, and each small hooked arc for a fathom the water would climb before slack. He said the harbour clock must be read like a sentence, starting at the top and going round.

I read it that winter, when he was abed with the fever and the shop was mine to mind. The crack ran straight through the word for turning back. Two of the rings said the same thing, then said it again with the dots shifted, and when I counted the boats still out past the bar I made it eleven where the tally board said twelve. I wrote the hour on the back of a tide table and walked it down to the slipway in the dark.

At quarter to five the clock struck low water, and in the quiet after it I heard eleven oars knocking against the wood.