Black fine line tattoo of overlapping concentric circles running diagonally along the inner forearm.

Overlapping circles on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A cluster of overlapping circles of varying sizes runs diagonally up the inner forearm, each containing smaller concentric rings and arcs. The linework is fine and uniform in black ink, with some circles shaded lightly to add depth. The tattoo sits against plain pale skin and a white background, with a grey sleeve at the left edge of the frame.

Geometric Fine line Forearm Circle Concentric circle Ring Arc Geometric pattern

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 sluice wheel at Harrow Lock has seized again, and you are the only one aboard the Mercy Jane who knows to lean on the second spoke rather than the first. Mrs Okonedo won't believe it until the gate groans open and the lower pound fills with brown water. Then she only says you had better not get above yourself, and hands you the windlass as though it were a favour.

Keep reading

The cargo is what the Oxford breakers pay for: crates of clock movements stripped from a Birmingham works, each wheel stamped with rings inside rings. Somewhere past Thrupp you start counting them. Every movement has one wheel that turns when nothing touches it, a small smug rotation like a cat deciding on a doorway. Mrs Okonedo says they are only sprung badly. You do not argue, but you keep one in your coat pocket, and on the third night it has pulled itself half round, pointing back the way you came.

At Kidlington the water refuses to rise. You crouch on the gate beam with the wheel in your palm, and its rings line up with the rings of the lock keeper's cottage clock across the water, one after another, until the paddles drop with a sound like a held breath. The pound lifts. The barge rises. Mrs Okonedo, at the tiller, does not look round.

Later, when the lamps are lit along the cut, you watch the ripples from the bow. Each ring spreads out and runs into the next, overlapping, none of them quite ending. Behind the stern they keep widening into the dark, and nobody on the cut thinks to tell them to stop.