Fine line black tattoo of overlapping circles with dotwork accents across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Overlapping circles and dots on a upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph from behind of a person with short dark hair, showing a black ink tattoo of overlapping circles of varying sizes arranged in a vertical cluster down the middle of the upper back. The circles are drawn in fine, thin outlines, with rows of solid and stippled dots running along some of the larger rings and smaller dots scattered between them. The skin tone is warm, the black bra straps are visible at the shoulders, and the tattoo is the only ink in the frame.

Fine line Dotwork Geometric Back Circle Overlapping circles Concentric circle Dot Geometric shape Outline

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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

Sit where the lamp can reach you, because this is the part my own mother never got right. Up at Tellwood, above the mill, there was a clockmaker called Ezra Dunn, and he built an orrery in the back room over the shop. Brass rings, one inside the next, none of them quite true to the others, so the whole thing hummed when you turned the handle. He said the rings were the paths the lights walked, and the dots were little moons that never settled on one line.

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Ezra had nine moons on that machine. Eight were soldered on proper, but the ninth he never finished, because his wife Hester said she would not have a moon that wandered off. So he left it loose in a tin, a dot of silver the size of a barley grain, and every night he meant to fix it.

In the spring of 1953 the tin went missing. Ezra blamed the milk boy, then the vicar's dog, then himself. Hester said nothing, only walked up the hill each evening with a lantern and stood at the top of the lane looking at the sky. When I asked her why, she said she was checking the count.

Then one night in November I stood on that same hill with her, and she pointed with her chin. There, low over the chapel roof, a small bright point sat exactly on the edge of the old ring of stars, where no star had any business being. We never told Ezra. He still winds the machine every morning, and each morning the loose moon has an extra tick to it, as if it is trying to get home.