Black fine line tattoo of overlapping circles crossed by a vertical and horizontal line with arrowheads, placed on the calf.

Overlapping circles and crosshair on a calf

Fine line · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two overlapping circles, one smaller and partly hidden behind the larger, crossed by a vertical line and a horizontal line ending in arrowheads. Small dots and tick marks sit along the axes, and a diagonal line cuts across the lower circle. The linework is thin and precise, with light grey shading, and the design is centred on a pale, smooth area of skin.

Fine line Geometric Calf Circle Arrow Line Compass

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

Dear Nell, the instrument came back from the makers with its brass ring scratched, and I have spent three evenings trying to make the two sightings from Harrow Stile agree. They will not. Mr Pargeter swears the peg was set in 1871 at the foot of the gatepost, but the gatepost is gone, and in its place there is a hawthorn with a bootlace tied round it.

Keep reading

I took the theodolite out alone on Tuesday, before the mist lifted, and sighted the church tower across the valley. Then I turned the circle a hair to the east and sighted again, and the tower had moved a finger's width against the sky. Nothing moves a church. I wrote it down twice, once in pencil and once in ink, the way Father taught us, so that no clerk could argue.

On Thursday a boy from the farm walked up with a tin of tea and asked what I was counting. I told him the distance between two things that refused to stay put. He thought about this, then said the hawthorn had been moved every spring since his grandfather's time, by whoever happened to own the lower field, and that the old peg was under the second stone wall, where the ground dips.

I dug there with a borrowed spade. The peg was there, rotten to a stub, and beside it a second brass plate, newer, scratched with a cross and two arrows pointing away from one another. The sightings agree now. I shall send the drawing when I have inked it. You will laugh, but I have drawn it with the smaller circle hidden behind the larger, because that is how it sits on the ground.