Black fine line geometric tattoo of arrows, circles, triangles and dots running diagonally down the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric arrows and circles on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of several thin parallel lines, each carrying arrowheads, small circles, dots and solid triangles, running diagonally along the forearm. The linework is fine and even, with two larger open circles and a few filled shapes giving the design weight. The photograph is black and grey with a soft, blurred background that keeps the focus on the skin.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Arrow Circle Triangle Dot Line

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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

You have the tide board propped on the bench again, its chalk arrows gone grey where the damp got into the slate, and Mr Pryce from the chandlery is leaning in the doorway waiting to hear whether the Morwenna can go out on the ebb. You run your thumb down the pencilled lines the way your father taught you: one line for each channel into the harbour mouth, arrowheads for the set of the water, small rings where the buoys sit, and solid triangles where the rocks show at low springs. There are five channels. Four of them run true. The fifth has been wandering since Tuesday, sliding off its course like a dropped thread.

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Nobody else in Carrick Hollow reads the board now. The harbour master has a screen in his office that tells him everything, and it has never once been wrong about a rock it could not see, which is the trouble with it. Your father drew the board by hand every morning for thirty-one years, and every correction is layered on top of the last in a different pencil, so that reading it is like reading the shoreline itself: a record of where the sand moved and where the sea decided it had changed its mind.

You find his last note near the bottom edge, written small, almost apologetic. Fifth channel shifted. Trust the rings, not the arrows. You sit with that longer than you mean to. The rings are the buoys, which can be moved by a storm and a lazy crew alike. The arrows are only the water's habit. You rub out the wandering line, redraw it straight, and tell Mr Pryce the ebb is fine.

He goes down to the slipway whistling. Out past the breakwater the gulls cross the sky in a long slanting diagonal, every bird keeping the same distance from the next, and you watch them until they dip below the wall and the board on the bench is only lines again.