Black and grey dotwork tattoo of an isometric maze wrapping around a forearm, with shaded blocks and raised walls.

Isometric maze on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the forearm with an isometric maze made of stepped walls and passages that recede into the skin. Solid black blocks and stippled dot shading give the walls a three-dimensional, raised look against the lighter skin. The design is entirely black and grey and fills the frame from the top edge down to the wrist, against a dark leather background.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The maze went up on a Tuesday, which Mr Alderney said was unlucky for anything with walls. He built it from plywood he had painted grey and then stepped, each course of blocks set back a hand's width from the one below, so that from the ground the passages seemed to climb toward the big top like the sides of a stone ziggurat. Dad called it a staircase that had lost its way. I helped carry the panels off the lorry and learned to say isometric without tripping over it, which Mr Alderney said was the only real skill a fairground needed.

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On the last night of the season the lights went out one by one, and the only thing still glowing was the maze. Tommy from the candyfloss stall dared me to run it blind. I went in with my left hand on the plywood, as Mr Alderney had taught me, and the walls kept turning me back. Every block looked like the one before it. I counted turns and lost the count at nine. The wall was warm where my palm rested, and the ground seemed to rise beneath my boots, as if the whole thing were slowly lifting off the field.

Near dawn I climbed the rusted steps of the Wheel and looked down. From up there the maze was no maze at all. Its stepped passages were the rows of lorries, the stalls and the caravan with the cracked window, all pressed into the dark earth like dots on paper. At the centre sat a small black block with no door. Mr Alderney stood beside it with a brush in one hand and a tin of dots in the other, and he waved up at me as though he had been expecting me all along.