Grey shaded tattoo of a stacked object with a pointed top, coiled rings and a rounded base, on the inner wrist of a raised hand.

Grey stacked object on inner wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A grey tattoo of a stacked, geometric object sits on the inner wrist, with a pointed cone at the top, several ring-like coils in the middle and a rounded base with a dark rectangular shape. The linework is soft and the forms are shaded with black and grey tones, with a small patch of teal-blue detail on the right side. The hand is raised against a plain pale wall, with the tattoo centred in the lower half of the frame.

Forearm Ring Sphere Geometric shape

Find an artist for this

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 buoy came in on the morning tide, nosed against the slip at Hallan with its cone split and a crab sitting in the lower ring as if it had paid for the seat. You knelt on the wet concrete and worked the crab out with a gloved thumb, then turned the thing over in your hands. Someone had built it the old way: a base like a riveted iron sphere, five collars stacked one above another, and a cone at the top to shed the rain. The dark rectangle on the base was a door nobody had opened since before you were born.

Keep reading

Mrs Ferrier came down the path with a flask and asked whether it could be saved. She had painted the collars red every spring for forty years, and she still kept the tin, dried to a crust on the shelf of her porch. "It rings when the swell's right," she said. "My husband used to say you could hear it across to Skail if the wind was south." You told her the cone could be beaten back into shape by Friday, and the seal on the sphere would take a week, if the glass came over from the mainland in time.

The glass did not come. On Thursday you walked the shingle at low water with a bucket and a sieve, looking for anything the sea had polished blue enough to fit the gap in the base. You found a chip of green bottle, then a curl of cobalt, then nothing for two hours. Your back ached. The gulls wheeled over the ruined pier and argued about nothing in particular.

Late on Friday you fixed the blue chip into the seam with resin, and when you carried the buoy out to the end of the slip in the skiff, the swell lifted it and the collars knocked together, once, twice, a sound like a spoon against a cup. Mrs Ferrier raised her flask from the rocks. You lowered it back into the water and let the tide decide whether it would stay.