Fine line and dotwork tattoo on an upper arm, with a shaded black mandala circle, red geometric polygons and dotted lines rising upward.

Mandala and geometric lines on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A black and grey mandala-style circle sits at the centre of the design, with concentric rings and a small star pattern shaded in dense hatching. Surrounding it, overlapping red polygons and thin black vertical lines with dotted ends extend up the arm, alongside arcs and compass-like marks. The composition is an upright column of linework on a bare upper arm, with the red shapes adding the only strong colour.

Fine line Geometric Dotwork Upper arm Mandala Circle Polygon Dotted line Arc Compass Geometric shape Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The surveyor's daughter had walked the wall of Caddon Keep three times before she would believe the stones were lying. Her father had left her the brass instrument and a sheaf of paper with the castle drawn on it, every tower and sally port set true to the compass, and the ruin on the hill did not match a single line.

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"It sits crooked," she told the sheep-keeper who had come up to watch. "The gate faces a bearing that doesn't exist."

He shrugged and said the keep had been crooked since the lord who built it made his bargain with the hill. Everybody knew that. Ask anyone in the valley where true north was and they would point at the ruin, because the ruin was the only thing that had never moved.

So she took a rope, a stick of red chalk and her father's compass, and she ran a line from the broken gate outward, staking it at every hundred paces. Where the lines crossed on the heath she dug, and under the peat she found a ring of worked stone, and inside it a plate of iron scored with dots, one for each star the lord had counted before he lost his name.

She set the plate upright on the wall and let the evening sun fall through the gap. The shadow of every stake pointed to the same place on the grass, and at that place, when she knelt, there was a small bright hollow where the true north had waited all along. She filled it with her own compass needle and went home to sleep, and in the morning the keep stood straight.