Black linework tattoo of overlapping circles and arcs with red and blue wash on the upper arm and shoulder of a man in a dark top.

Overlapping circles and arcs on upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows several overlapping circular and oval outlines with fine interior arcs, lines and small dots. Bold black outlines define the main shapes, while red and blue washes spread loosely across the centre and lower sections. The photograph is a close, angled view of the upper arm and shoulder, with the design filling most of the frame.

Geometric Upper arm Shoulder Circle Oval Arc Line Dot Abstract shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass rings had come back from the foundry warped, and Edith Pyle spent the whole of Tuesday with her loupe screwed into one eye, tapping each blank against the bench to hear whether it still rang true. Mr Hallam wanted seven dials for the tower clock at St Ives, each overlapping the next like the rings a pebble leaves on still water, every one turning on its own pin. When the clock struck noon, he said, the inner circles should all fall into a single notch and the whole face would read as one eye.

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She worked the enamel by lamplight. For the faces she used washes of madder and indigo, thinned with spirit so they would bleed under the heat of the kiln and never fire the same way twice. The fine arcs she scribed by hand with a steel point, the small dots with a pricker she had inherited from her father, whose initials were still stamped on its wooden grip. Ink pooled in the grooves where the black outlines met, and by Thursday the set looked less like a clock than a map of somewhere that had been drawn in a hurry.

On the last night she found the outermost ring a hair's width out of true. She could have filed it straight in ten minutes. Instead she sat with the lamp guttering and thought of her father's hand on the pricker, the way he had always left one small mark a fraction off centre, saying that a perfect thing would never be allowed to keep time.

The following noon the tower struck twelve. Through the glass of the workshop window she watched the gulls lift off the harbour wall, and high above the town the seven faces turned, all but one falling into place, and the one that didn't sat a little apart, the way she had left it.