Four pen drawings of tattoo designs: a dotwork geometric stag, a jellyfish, a ram skull inside a circle and two feathers, all in black ink on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric stag, jellyfish, ram skull and feathers

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

The collage shows four black ink drawings on white paper: a stag head built from geometric facets, a jellyfish with long trailing tentacles, a ram skull set within a circle and triangle outline, and two feathers. The stag and ram skull use stippled dotwork for shading, while the jellyfish and feathers combine fine linework with dotted and faceted geometric shading. The layout is a four-panel grid with a pen lying across several panels.

Dotwork Geometric Stag Deer Jellyfish Skull Feather Triangle Circle Geometric shape Dotwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz,

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The rain has got under the awning again, so the stag is curling at one corner and the jellyfish has gone soft where I breathed on it. Mrs Okonedo from the fishmonger's stopped by at eleven to ask if I could draw her late husband's ram, the one from the farm above Llandovery. I told her I would do it for nothing if she stopped standing under my canopy dripping onto the paper.

She didn't stop, but she did sit down on the crate. While she talked I kept the fineliner moving, dot by dot, the way you taught me: no hurrying the shading, let the stipple gather like weather. By the time she left, the skull had its shadow on the left side and the circle sat true inside its triangle. She said he would have hated the geometry and loved the horns. I think that is the kindest review a drawing has ever had.

The feathers took longer. The stag I can do in my sleep now, facet by facet, but the jellyfish keeps wanting to become a storm of lines and I have to make it hold still. I finished the last tentacle at dusk with the market lamps coming on, rain sliding off the canvas in a bright string. Halfway down I realised I had drawn the trailing lines as if they were falling rather than drifting, so I went back over every one with the pen I had left lying across the table.

Come Saturday if the weather lets you. Bring a dry jacket and tell me what the sea looked like the summer you went out past the breakwater.