Close view of a fine line geometric tattoo with dotwork on a forearm, held against a brown leather bag with embossed line patterns.

Geometric lines and dots on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A forearm and hand grip a brown leather bag decorated with dark embossed geometric lines. The tattoo runs down the inner forearm as thin grey lines, short hatched strokes, dots and a single purple vertical line that ends in a small triangular cluster. The background is black and the model wears a red and black knitted top with white trim.

Geometric Dotwork Fine line Forearm Geometric line Dot Vertical line Triangle

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

Brother Anselm has taught you to rule a page before you write on it, and the rule is the first thing you learn at Saint Wenna's: a straight line drawn with the blunt edge of a bone folder, then hatched, then dotted where the ink wants to rest. You are nineteen and your hand shakes when Anselm watches, so he stands behind you at the scriptorium window and says nothing until the ink dries.

Keep reading

The bell-ringer's ledger has gone missing. For forty years the count of the bells was pricked onto vellum each dawn in a column of grey strokes, short hatched marks for the lesser peals and a single violet line for the great one, which ends in three small triangles where the tenor rope was tied. Nobody can say when the count stopped. You find the book in the damp of the undercroft, a folio swollen like bread, the dots run into one another and the violet ink bled pale at the edges.

You copy it out again through the winter, though you cannot read what the numbers meant. In February Anselm finally tells you that the triangles were never bells. They were the days the abbey buried someone, and the violet line was the rope that let the coffin down the hill in the snow. You sit with that a long while, your pen dry, the window going dark. Then you draw the last triangle larger than the rest and leave the column open beneath it, because the ringer's count has to go on for whoever comes next.