Fine line geometric tattoo of overlapping circles and dotted arrow lines running down the inner forearm, in black ink.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric circles and arrows on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows several overlapping circles, some solid and some dotted, crossed by thin vertical lines with small dots along them. The lines taper into an arrow-like point near the wrist. The work is in fine black linework and dotwork with no shading, and the composition runs vertically along the forearm against a plain grey background.

Fine line Dotwork Geometric Forearm Circle Arrow Line Dot Geometric shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The theodolite had iced over again by the time we reached the col, so Ruth and I took our bearings the old way, sighting along a pencil held at arm's length while the wind tried to lift the sheet from my knees. My father had taught me that trick on the Tarn road forty years before, when the county still paid men to walk in straight lines across other people's hills.

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We drew the rings first. Three circles stacked down the page like coins on a windowsill: one solid, for the stone the surveyors had cut, and two dotted, for the ground we could only guess at under the snow. Ruth ran the sighting lines through their centres, each a thin rule with a dot every hundred paces, until the whole thing looked less like a map than a stopped clock. At the foot of it the lines tapered into a point, and the point was the village of Greave, where the bread van would not come until the thaw.

She wanted the arrow to point down, towards the road and the warm kitchens. I kept measuring. The dotted circles were not wrong, only unfinished, and the last sighting showed the valley bending north of where the old map said it should. Somebody had drawn the first rings from the wrong side of the ridge, and we were standing exactly where they had meant to stop.

We inked the final dot at dusk, our fingers too numb to hold the nib steady. Ruth rolled the sheet, tucked it under her coat and started back up the scree towards the cairn, because the arrow, we agreed, had always been pointing at the place it began.