Black circle tattoo on a calf with white geometric mountain linework and white dots for stars, in a blackwork and dotwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric mountains in a black circle on a calf

Blackwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black circle holds a range of white geometric mountain peaks drawn in fine triangular linework, with a scatter of small white dots above them suggesting stars. The black fill is dense and even, and the white lines create a crisp contrast against the pale skin around the design. The composition is centred and simple, with the peaks rising from the lower edge of the circle toward the top.

Blackwork Dotwork Geometric Calf Mountain Star Circle Night sky Dot 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 hands you the lamp at the second bell and tells you the mountains have moved again. You climb the stair to the roof of the scriptorium, where the cold makes your teeth ache, and find the sheet of vellum pinned under a stone on the parapet. It is a black disc, inked so thick the wet ink still shines, and inside it the range of peaks is drawn in fine white lines, every ridge cut into triangles like the facets of a split flint. Above them the old brothers have pricked the stars with a bone stylus, one dot for each lamp they have lit for the dead.

Keep reading

You have been given the work because your hand is steady and because nobody else will sit out until the sky turns grey. Tonight the eastern peak sits a finger's width lower than it did last week. You hold the lantern over the vellum and then over the real mountains, which are only a darker dark against the stars. Beside the sheet lies Anselm's rule, written in his cramped hand: draw what is there, never what you wish were there. You lean closer and see that the lowest ridge has a small notch you did not put there.

You take the pen and prick a new dot into the black, placed where the notch points, and you say the name of the novice who died in the snow the winter before last, because the rule says the stars are for the lamps. Then you trace the peak back up, one line at a time, until the triangles close again.

In the morning Anselm finds the new dot and says nothing. He leaves the lamp on your hook and the stone on your sheet, and he sets the pen where your hand will fall.