Three matching black and colour circular tattoos with swirling linework, on two forearms and an ankle, with a small blue floral tattoo on a second ankle at the top of the frame.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching circular designs on wrists and ankles

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Three people's limbs are shown together, with a circular emblem tattoo on the inner forearm at left, a matching design on the ankle at centre and another on the wrist at right. Each design has bold black outlines, decorative swirls and inner shapes filled with green, red and yellow ink. A separate tattoo of blue flowers sits on an ankle at the top of the frame, against a dark background.

Forearm Ankle Circle Emblem Swirl Flower Matching tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Pryce had the bell rope in one hand and a fistful of wet coins in the other when the three of them came down the slipway at dusk, shouting over each other about a debt none of them could remember. I had worked that crossing for nineteen years and never once seen a fare arrive already quarrelling.

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The eldest held out a tin disc cut from an old biscuit box. Someone had painted three birds on it, chasing their own tails inside a ring, one green, one red, one yellow, and the black lines had been gone over so many times the tin was nearly dull. "Our mother's," she said. "Three birds, one ring. You don't leave it halfway." The youngest had the same design scratched onto the inside of her wrist with a hatpin, and she kept rubbing at it as if it might come off.

Halfway over, the mist came down so thick I could not see the bow. The oars knocked against nothing. The youngest started to laugh, then to cry, and the middle brother swore at both of them. I told them the Solway has one rule: you row the ring or the ring rows you. So they rowed, and every stroke seemed to turn one of the birds a little further round the circle, until the yellow one was biting at the red one's tail and nobody was shouting any more.

At the far shore they paid me in a single coin, pressed flat and warm from their hands. They stood in the mud holding their wrists together like a set of keys, and the last of the light caught the yellow bird. I rowed back alone with the coin in my pocket, and the river was quiet all the way home.