Black and grey fine line tattoo of overlapping circles with a soft shaded half-moon and a horizontal line across the inner forearm.

Overlapping circles and horizontal line on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a forearm with a tattoo of three overlapping thin-lined circles crossed by a single horizontal line. The lower part of the central circle is filled with soft grey shading that fades toward the edges. The plain light wall behind and the blue striped sleeve keep the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Circle Line Geometric shape

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 master had three rings of copper wire on his bench when I arrived, and he would not let me touch the compass until I could draw a circle without lifting the point. For forty days I drew circles in wax on the workshop floor, rubbing out the bad ones with my heel. On the forty-first morning Kallias set a bronze disc between my palms and said the horizon is only a line that has agreed to hold still.

Keep reading

That autumn the moon went dark over the Pharos harbour wall, and he took me up the stairs before dawn with a lamp and a bag of chalk. He showed me how the earth's shadow slid across the moon's face while the sun sat behind us, three bodies that could never be seen together except by the arithmetic of their edges. He told me to draw them as they stood in the sky, each ring cutting the others, and to lay the wall across them as the line we stood on. When I came to the moon's lower curve I wanted to hatch it with fine strokes, the way the scribes did, but the shadow had no hard edge, so I pressed my thumb into the ink and let it bleed away toward the rim.

Kallias looked at the page for a long while. He did not praise the circles. He took the chalk from my hand, drew a single stroke through the wall, and said that everything above that line was only geometry, and everything below it was what we could honestly be sure of. Then he pressed his own thumb to the smudge and left a grey print on the stone, the same shade as the shadow, and told me to leave it there until the rain took it.