Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a rose with geometric arrows, triangles and circles running vertically along the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric rose and arrow down the ribs

Geometric · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical column of tattooed geometric shapes runs down the side of the ribs, with stacked chevrons and an arrow at the top, a shaded rose in the centre and a circle with dots, diamonds and a triangle below. The linework is fine and the rose and some shapes are built up with stippled dotwork shading. The tattoo is entirely black and grey against pale skin, and the composition is centred on the vertical axis of the body.

Geometric Dotwork Botanical Ribs Rose Arrow Triangle Circle Dot Diamond Chevron Geometric shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The surveyor's daughter kept the instruments in a cedar box lined with green baize, and on the night the river took the bridge at Harrowmere she unpacked every one of them onto the kitchen table. Her father had drawn the county's boundaries for thirty years and never once got a line wrong, which was why the parish had asked him to fix the new ferry crossing. Now he lay upstairs with his chest wrapped, and the ferryman had gone off with the money and the only chart.

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She worked by the lamp until the wick guttered. The stippled hills on the old sheet had been shaded with a hundred tiny pricks of ink, each one a stone or a reed or a sheep's footprint, and she counted them the way her father had taught her, one dot at a time, until the number matched the field book. A compass rose at the margin pointed not north but toward a circle he had drawn and never explained, with three small diamonds strung beneath it like buoys.

At dawn she walked down to the water with the sheet folded inside her coat. The circle, she saw, was the bend where the old wheel had stood, and the triangle at its foot marked the one true depth. She waded in to her knees, pushed the first diamond aside with a pole, and felt the gravel firm under the mud. The ferry could cross again by noon. Her father would want to hear it, though she suspected he already knew.