Charcoal sketch of Metatron's cube, a geometric design of overlapping circles joined by straight lines inside a cube outline, on white paper.

Metatron's cube sketch in charcoal

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn sketch of Metatron's cube, made of thirteen overlapping circles connected by a network of straight lines that form a cube and its inner geometry. The linework is dark and heavy in places, with smudged, textured edges that suggest charcoal or graphite shading. The design is centred on a plain white background and is entirely black and grey.

Geometric Sacred geometry Circle Cube Line Hexagon

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 thirteenth circle was the one nobody could find on the survey sheets. Mrs Abernethy pinned the drawing to the board on my first night at the office on Calder Yard, a cube of ink lines laid flat over a grid of streets, and told me to stop trying to make the city agree with it. Twelve of the rings sat on real corners: the chapel, the lamp works, the foot of the canal steps. The thirteenth floated in the middle, where the lines crossed like wet washing.

Keep reading

I worked the late shift alone after that. The tram wires hummed past the window until the last car went into the depot at half one, and then the building settled and I could hear my pencil. I began to go over the lines at night with a stiff brush and a jar of lamp black, the way Abernethy had shown me, so the edges bled and smudged the way the old drawings did. Each night the cube sat a fraction further from the street plan, and each night the middle circle grew darker.

In the third week I stayed past closing and walked the ring of corners with a torch. At the chapel the steps were freshly scrubbed. At the lamp works a door I had never noticed stood ajar onto a stair that smelt of wet charcoal, and at the top of it, pinned under a sheet of glass, lay a drawing identical to mine, its centre already filled in solid black.

I went back to the desk and picked up the brush. I did not finish the shading. I left the centre clean, the one white space the whole city had been drawn around, and when the first car rattled out of the depot I folded the sheet into my coat and walked home by the canal.