Geometric tattoo of a stylised tribal mask with purple and yellow accents and grey shading on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric tribal mask tattoo

Geometric · Other · Mixed · Photo

A stylised tribal mask sits within a sunburst of triangles, with concentric circles for eyes and a rounded central form. The design uses bold black outlines, grey shading and fills of purple and yellow-orange. It is centred on the skin with a plain pale background.

Geometric Other Mask Triangle Concentric circle Sunburst Geometric pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sports hall still smells of floor polish and the orange squash nobody has stopped serving, and Dennis Hollis is halfway through a story about his mortgage when you notice the mask above the trophy cabinet. You remember it at once, though you haven't thought of it in twenty years. Mrs Ansell's art group made it out of papier mâché in the spring of 1994, painted in the three colours the school could afford, purple, ochre and black, and it hung in the corridor outside the kiln room until somebody decided it looked like a dinner plate that had lost an argument.

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Up close it is stranger than you recalled. The sunburst is made of triangles, each one outlined so hard the pen nearly tore the card, and the concentric rings for eyes seem to follow you as you cross the room. Somebody has repainted the lower teeth in a yellow far brighter than anything on the original. Dennis says the class called it Old Sunny, and that you were the one who named it, which you don't remember at all.

You count the rays on the left side the way you used to count them during double maths: twelve, then eleven, then the gap where a triangle has been picked off with a fingernail. Under the chin, in pencil so faint it could be a crease in the card, someone has written your name and the date of the last day of the summer term. You hold your glass a little tighter and tell yourself the rings have only moved because the light has.

When the caretaker starts stacking chairs, you go over and press your thumb against the yellow teeth. The paint is still tacky. Behind you Dennis laughs at something, the hall lights click off one bank at a time, and you find yourself counting the triangles again, certain there were fewer of them when you came in.