Chest tattoo of an outlined geometric house in dotwork and black ink, with fine-line flower stems and red dotted rays, plus a number on the shoulder.

Geometric house and flower stems on chest

Dotwork · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A dotwork and blackwork outline of a three-dimensional house or cube sits centrally on the chest, with fine-line flower stems growing across it. Red dotted rays radiate outward behind the design, and orange tones add colour to some of the flower heads. A line of numerals, reading 137.03599908, sits on the shoulder.

Dotwork Botanical Geometric Chest Shoulder House Cube Flower Sunburst Ray Number

Find an artist for this

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 drawing was already pinned above the kitchen range when Ada came back from the fen, its corners gone soft with steam. A house, or the idea of one, drawn as a cube with its far wall pushed through its near one, so the door seemed to open onto the window. Her father had sketched it at the drainage board's dinner table, he said, while the surveyor talked about sluice gates, and then he had refused to explain it.

Keep reading

Across the cube grew cow parsley, stems thin as hair, heads opening like umbrellas in the ditch light. Ada knew the plants because she had been pulling them from the lock garden since she was small, and she knew they came up every June whether anyone wanted them or not. Her father had written a row of figures beneath the drawing in his square capitals: 137.03599908. When she asked what they meant, he said they were the number that kept the lights from falling apart, and that nobody had ever worked out why it was that size and not some other.

That summer she measured everything. She paced the lock, counted the sluice boards, and dropped weighted string down the well behind the house to see how far the water ran under the marsh. Each night she came back to the drawing and found the cube had shifted a degree, the parsley higher on the far wall, one more umbel open. Red dotted rays had appeared on the paper around it, as if someone had pricked the sun into the sheet with a pin.

In September her father stopped coming down to breakfast. Ada took his tea up and found him asleep in the chair by the window, the drawing folded in his lap with the house turned inside out. The flower stems had gone to seed and bent towards the glass. She set the cup on the sill, took the pencil from behind his ear, and under the figures wrote her own name where the house had its door.