Abstract geometric tattoo on a lower leg in yellow, orange and blue-grey, with a halftone face, a circular silhouette and green splatter.

Geometric shapes and silhouette on a calf

Geometric · Calf · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo combines overlapping triangles and angular panels in yellow, orange and pale blue-grey with a halftone portrait in black dots and fine hatching. A black circular silhouette of a head and shoulders sits lower down beside a cursive script word, with dotted circles and green splashes spreading across the design. The photograph is taken straight on at the leg, with the colour ink dominating the composition.

Geometric Calf Triangle Silhouette Circle Script Splatter Dotted circle

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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 flood has taken the boundary stones again, so you kneel in the grey silt below the Canopic road with a bronze pair of dividers and a sheet of papyrus weighted down by a river pebble. Your knees are wet through. Behind you the canal boys are shouting over the water, and the sun is already hot on the back of your neck, which is what your teacher warned would happen if you stayed out past the third hour.

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Dion says the field is his. He carries a sealed contract from the grain office and a face like a coin rubbed smooth, all bright patience and no edges. You have only your grandfather's measuring cord, knotted every cubit, and his rule that a line drawn in damp ground cannot lie if the centre is pricked true. So you prick the centres, one, two, three, and swing your arcs until the field resolves into angled wedges: yellow where the reeds have dried, ochre where the soil cracks, pale grey where the water still stands in shallow sheets.

On the third arc your dividers catch on something hard. You scrape the silt away with your thumb and find a squared stone with your grandfather's mark cut into its face, a small circle with a dot at its heart. Dion's contract puts the boundary three cubits east of where the water carried the stones. Your lines put it exactly here.

You press your seal ring into the wet clay beside the stone, the little head of the old king turned sideways in its gold, and watch the dimples settle into the mud. Let Dion take that to the grain office. The river has been wrong before, and so, you suspect, has he.