Black and white engraving of six geometric tattoo motifs, including crosses, rosettes and star shapes, from a printed historical figure.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Historic tattoo motif engraving

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A black and white engraved plate showing six circular and star-like motifs arranged in two rows, labelled as Fig. 127 with the French caption for motifs commonly used in tattooing. The designs are built from radial lines, dots, small crosses and concentric rings, drawn with fine, even linework. The plain cream background and evenly spaced layout make each motif easy to compare.

Geometric Cross Rosette Star Dot Concentric circle Snowflake Sprig

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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 salt harbour at Wrenmouth has steered its boats by tide-codes for longer than anyone can count, and by the time you reach the drowned archive the old plate is already brittle. You lay it flat on the slate table while the lamp hums, and six rosettes look up at you, each one a station on the old net, each a way of saying which channel is safe after dark. The caption underneath is in a language nobody here reads any more, which is why the people who copied it kept the drawings and not the words.

Keep reading

Mother Tesk taught you to read them by their spokes. Count the rays, she said, then count the dots between. Four spokes and a small cross means the sandbar shifts on the ebb. The long-armed star, frost-fine like a pattern on a cold window, means someone is buried under the north wall and you should not pass it without leaving a coin. You copy them into the ledger in pencil because ink bleeds in the damp, and you never argue when she insists the meanings are older than the names for them.

The seventh page of the ledger was never marked. When you finally open it, there is a rosette on it in a hand you know, though you have never drawn one like it. Beneath it, a single line: the channel you are standing in is the one we closed. The boats came back through it anyway, every spring, because someone kept reading the rings the wrong way round.

You turn the plate over. The back is blank. You pick up the pencil, press it lightly, and add one more spoke.