Black fine line geometric tattoo of overlapping circles, arrows, a triangle and a wave-like swirl on the inner forearm.

Geometric circles and arrows on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of overlapping circles, a small triangle, straight and curved arrows, and a wave-like swirl inside a larger ring, set on the inner forearm. The linework is fine and thin, with dotwork used for shading on the triangle and some circles, and the wave is rendered with layered hatched lines. The design is shown in black and grey against pale skin, with a blurred background.

Fine line Geometric Dotwork Forearm Circle Triangle Arrow Wave Geometric shape Swirl Dot

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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 arrow has drifted off the plot again, and Ilse Varga is the only one on the survey barge who has noticed. You pin the chart flat with two brass weights and trace the line from the small triangle at the bottom, the one with its dotted sun, up through the crowded rings to the swell you have spent eleven years failing to explain.

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The Ferrier Belt was charted in the year the ships stopped using paper. Every circle on the map is a moon that has agreed to keep its orbit, and the arrows are the ones that did not. The wave sits inside the great ring like something poured into a bowl, the tide-scar where the outer giant drags at the crust of the inner world. Old crews called it the Mouth. You call it the hatching, because that is how it looks under the scope: a thousand fine lines drawn by a hand that was in no hurry.

On the last shift a dotted circle appeared in the margin of your log, small and neat, as though someone had sketched it in the spare minutes of a long watch. Nobody on the barge had drawn it, and the dots were spaced exactly the width of the instrument's tolerance. You checked the sequence twice and then once more. Each time, the arrow from the triangle bent a fraction towards the swell, as if it had been waiting for you to look.

You do not report it. Instead you take the pen, add a second arrow from the ring's edge, and draw it straight out past the last moon, where the chart runs out and the paper is blank. Morning comes up grey through the porthole. Somewhere beyond the margin, a ship you have never seen turns its nose towards the Mouth and starts counting.