Flash sheet of eighteen black line drawings of circular geometric designs with rings, dots, hexagons and straight lines, in a three by six grid.

Grid of circular geometric line designs

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of eighteen circular designs arranged in a three by six grid on a white background. Each design combines thin and thick concentric rings with small solid and open circles, straight intersecting lines, and some hexagon outlines. The linework is black and crisp, with no shading, and the designs vary in density and layout.

Geometric Fine line Circle Ring Dot Line Hexagon Geometric pattern Concentric circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, the fire wants feeding and my knees want the warmth more than my tongue wants rest. You'll have heard of Brother Anselm, who sat at the north slope of the scriptorium with his ink pot and his ruler. Every night after compline he drew circles. Only circles, he said, the heavens are only circles if you look at them properly.

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The prior did not care for circles. He said a monk who draws wheels is either measuring the sky or planning to leave it, and neither suited a house with a roof that leaked. So Anselm drew them small, on the margins of psalters, with a thin nib and a thick one, and he hid the dots in the corners where the candle didn't reach. Rings within rings. A hexagon like the cells in the apiary, with a dark bead set at its heart where the honey would be.

Then came the winter the bell cracked and the frost lay on the mere until March. On the last night of February Anselm laid eighteen of his wheels in a row across the refectory table, and the prior, coming in for his cup of ale, stood over them a long while. He said nothing. He only lifted one, the one with a line slashing through it like a rope through a pulley, and held it up to the window.

Morning found the sheets pinned to the chapter house door, every wheel turned to face the same way, the black beads all sitting at the rim as though they had rolled there in the night. Brother Anselm was never seen again. The mill wheel on the mere has turned true ever since, and the beads, I'm told, still sit at the edge of every circle in that chapter house, waiting for someone to look properly.