Line drawing of overlapping concentric circles in blue and teal tones on a white background, shown as a tattoo design with no body visible.

Overlapping circles design in blue ink

Geometric · Colour · Flash

The image shows a row of overlapping circles of varying sizes, each containing concentric rings, small dots and inner discs. The linework is dark and clean, with blue and teal shading and wash applied within the rings. The design runs horizontally across a plain white background, with no skin or body part visible.

Geometric Circle Ring Dot Concentric circle Geometric pattern

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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

The rain has got into the dial box again, and you are kneeling on wet boards at the back of the Mirror Tent with a torch in your teeth, reading the rings the way Mr Ashdown taught you, outer to inner. Eight wheels, each a little off the last, sit bolted to a plank that once carried the lights for the Dancing Horses. Nobody has turned them since the season the big top came down in Carlisle.

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The small dots are the trouble. Ashdown said they were not decoration but counts, the number of times a wheel had to be wound before it would hold a tune. You have been counting them for three nights. The innermost disc on the third wheel carries a pale pip set off-centre, and when you tap it with a spanner the whole row hums, a low note that makes the canvas breathe in and out like a sleeper.

Tonight the owner's letter came, folded inside a programme from a better year. The ground is sold at Michaelmas, the horses are going to a farm near Penrith, and the tent is for scrap. Under the signature someone has pencilled a sum, and beside it a small circle drawn with a compass, overlapping the first.

You set the pip to the pip. The wheels turn over one another, each ring sliding past its neighbour until the dots line up in a single row, and the canvas lifts, slow as a sail. The lamps along the ring flicker on, one per circle, as if the whole fair were remembering its way home. You do not look at the clock. You let the last wheel catch and you say the number Ashdown always used to close a show. Then you wait for the crowd that is not there to start clapping.