Two forearms with black geometric tattoos: overlapping circle pattern on the left arm and a diamond lattice on the right, worn with a dark jacket.

Geometric circle and lattice forearm tattoos

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms are shown with black geometric tattoos, one with a pattern of overlapping circles forming a repeating star-like design and the other with a diamond lattice of solid black squares. The linework is crisp and even, with the circles drawn in fine outlines and the lattice filled in solid. The image is entirely black ink on skin, with the wearer's dark jacket and a black wristband framing the composition.

Geometric Blackwork Forearm Hand Circle Overlapping circles Lattice Diamond Square Geometric pattern Jacket

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The narrowboat Patience had carried coal up the Wey for forty years before anyone thought to ask what else she carried. Old Mab Corrie steered her the last stretch herself, one hand on the tiller and the other on the lattice of iron that held the bow gate shut. Every lock on the river had a gate like it, a grid of square bars that let the water through and kept the drowned things out.

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In the winter of the great frost, a boy named Tobias Wren came aboard at Woking with a sack of rivets and no people of his own. He asked Mab why the circles were painted on the cabin side, round and round, each one touching six others so that a star opened where they met. She said they were the lock's count. Each circle was a turn of the paddle, and a full set of them, rightly drawn, would show a boat the way home even in the dark.

They reached the bottom lock at midnight with the ice thick as slate. The gate would not shift. Tobias stood in the cold counting the squares of the iron and saw that the lattice had a gap the width of his thumb, where the frost had begun to lift one bar. He pushed. Mab laughed for the first time that winter and said the boy had read the pattern better than she had.

They cleared the lock by dawn. Tobias stayed on the Patience until the thaw, and when he left he took a square of the lattice scratched onto a scrap of tin, folded into his coat. Mab never asked what he did with it. She only noticed that the next boat through the lock had its bow ringed with circles, very small and very even.