Black and grey geometric tattoo of overlapping triangles, circles and a hexagonal polyhedron with dotwork shading on the inner forearm, with a city skyline behind.

Geometric polyhedron on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A raised forearm and open hand are photographed against a blurred city skyline. The tattoo shows a polyhedron outline with overlapping triangles, dashed and solid circles, and a striped triangular facet at the centre. Shading is built from fine stippled dots in grey and black, with no colour ink.

Geometric Dotwork Forearm Triangle Circle Hexagon Geometric shape City

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frame had been on the bench since Easter, a skeleton of brass wire with twenty faces still to be soldered, and Mr Pell had told me not to touch the one at the centre. Everyone in the workshop above the tram depot knew the story of that facet. Old Ruth had gone up the ladder to fix it in the winter of the big frost and come down without speaking, and the striped panel had stayed bare ever since.

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On Thursday the observatory man came for it. He wanted the whole thing hung from the dome by a single chain, a lantern for the city's rooftops, so the pigeons would have something to circle. I wrapped the brass in newspaper and carried it up Canal Street in the rain, the dashed circles knocking against my hip. At the top of the hill the cloud broke and the sun came over the terraces, and I understood why Ruth had gone quiet. Through the open faces the light fell in fine speckled dots across the slates, grey and then bright, as if someone had pricked the roofs with a needle.

I did not solder the striped facet. I left it open, a clean window cut in the wire, and told the observatory man it was deliberate. He looked at me as though I had forgotten a bolt. That evening, walking home past the gasworks, I looked up and saw the lantern swinging from its chain, and through the empty triangle the first star came out exactly where Ruth had said it would.