Fine line black tattoo of a symbol and the digits 193 beside a triangle enclosing a circle and vertical line, on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Numerals and triangle symbol tattoo

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a small cross-like symbol followed by the digits 193, placed beside a triangle with a circle and a vertical line inside it. The linework is thin, even and solid black, with no shading. The photograph is taken at close range against pale skin, with the design sitting in the centre of the frame.

Fine line Other Symbol Numeral Triangle Circle Line

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 boundary stone at Hollin Ash had been numbered by somebody who hated fractions, so every March it fell to me to walk the wet line with a tin of white paint and my grandfather's brass pocket compass. Stone 193 sat under a holly that had grown around it like a fist. I scraped the moss off the cross with my thumbnail and found the figures still there, cut deep into the granite in the same tilted hand as the ledger in the parish chest.

Keep reading

Gran never let me touch the compass when I was small. She kept it in a green baize box with a triangle pressed into the lid, a ring hung inside the triangle and a single bar running through the ring. Ask her what it meant and she said it was for finding the edge of things. I took that for a riddle until I was twelve and got lost in Tallow Wood with the sky gone grey at four in the afternoon and the path gone soft under my boots.

That was the day I learned to set a bearing by the bar and count my paces back to the gate. Gran was waiting at the stile with a lantern and no fuss at all. She only asked whether I had found 193, and when I said I had, she nodded as though I had passed a test I hadn't known I was sitting.

This March the holly was down after the gales and the stone lay half in the ditch. I levered it over with the crowbar and found the numerals on the underside too, smaller, with a line I had never noticed before running from the ring towards the wood. I stood there with the paint drying in its tin, and I understood that Gran had never been teaching me how to find the edge of the wood. She had been teaching me where to stand so I could see the way back in.