Black dotwork drawing of three interlocking triangles on pale paper, beside a black fine liner pen, shown as a tattoo design.

Interlocking triangles in dotwork

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn design of three interlocking triangles, built from clean outlines with the areas around the edges filled with stippled dots. The dots grow denser toward the outer edges and fade towards the centre, giving a soft shaded effect. The design is drawn in black ink on a pale grey background, with a black fine liner pen placed diagonally in the upper right corner.

Dotwork Geometric Triangle Dot Stipple Pen Paper

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 last ferryman on the Solent would not carry anyone whose triangles did not fit. That was what his grandmother said, and she had it from her own, and nobody on the mainland seemed to know where the rule came from anymore. So when a girl came down the shingle at Hamble with three grey frames of old card tucked under her arm, Tamsin Oyelaran asked her to hold them up to the light before she was let aboard.

Keep reading

The girl had made them herself, she said, from the walls of a drowned chapel. Each one was three triangles locked through one another, their edges left open, and a rain of tiny dots thickened around the outside like frost on a windowpane. Tamsin turned them over. The dots, when she looked close, were names, or the ghosts of names, pricked out by someone patient with a needle. "The centre is the part that holds," the girl said. "The outside is where everything else goes."

They crossed in the grey hour with the gulls standing on the water. Halfway over, the boat slowed in the tide race and the girl asked what the price was. Tamsin said the price was simple: the girl had to tell her which triangle was the one she had come to find. The girl pointed at the frame with the faintest dots, the one nearest the middle, and said her brother had gone out past the wind farms two winters back and never come home.

Tamsin rowed harder. At the far shore she handed the card back and said the middle was always the first to fade, so the brother was likely out there still, waiting where the dots ran thinnest, and that a ferry which could find its way home in the dark would find him too. The girl took the frames and stepped onto the pier without looking back, and the boat drifted home light.