Fine line geometric tattoo of overlapping circles and dotted arcs on a forearm, in black ink.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Overlapping circles on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A dense cluster of overlapping circles and arcs forms a symmetrical geometric design centred on the forearm. Solid fine lines alternate with dotted lines, and the thin strokes are shaded lightly without solid fills. The design is in black ink on pale skin, with a dark garment filling the background at the right edge.

Fine line Geometric Dotwork Forearm Circle Overlapping circles Arc Dotted line Ring

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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

Third week on Skerrow, and the sea still refused to agree with my drawings. I had pegged out six circles on the shingle above the north cove, each struck from a stake at the centre and each the exact length of the tide's reach between spring and neap. Where they crossed, the water came in and went out again, and I could never say which circle it had kept.

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Mrs Abernethy at the shop thought I was mad to measure a rock that moved. "It doesn't keep to your lines, Mr Lowry," she said, pressing a tin of tea on me that I had not asked for. Her husband had been a surveyor too, before the lighthouse pay was cut and he was left with a boat he could not afford to run. He had left a box of drawings in the loft. Every sheet was a set of intersecting rings, some solid, some dotted, the dotted ones marking where he had guessed the sea would stand on days he could not get out.

I spent the evening with his pencils and a candle. The dotted arcs were not guesses after all. Each one sat exactly where the water had stood in the autumn of the great storm, a height he had recorded and never published. Solid lines were what the tide did; dotted ones were what the island remembered. I drew a seventh circle at dawn, half in each.

When I went down at low water, my compass point had left a small dot in the wet sand where I had pressed it. The tide came up and took the dot, and then, as the light tipped over the cove, it brought it back exactly where it had been, neither earlier nor later, just where it belonged.