Colourful abstract tattoo of three overlapping circles with contour lines and cracked patterns on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Overlapping circles with contour lines on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Three overlapping circles sit on the forearm. The large upper circle has dark contour lines over purple, teal and orange shading, the lower left circle has red and orange crack-like linework over dark shading, and a pale green to yellow circle sits between them. The shading is soft and blended, and the colours are vivid against the skin.

Geometric Forearm Circle Abstract shape Gradient

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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 chart has been pinned above your bunk since Walvis Bay, and by the fourteenth day of the crossing you can recite its contour lines without looking. Tight rings for the shoals, wider loops where the seabed drops away, and the soundings Captain Okonedo penciled in the margin: forty fathoms, thirty-one, nine. Nobody aboard the Marigold Reach quite believes the island is still there. The company charts are older than the engines.

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On the fifteenth night the cloud tears open and the moon comes up low and swollen over the bow. You take the middle watch with the second officer, Ines, who sweeps her torch across the water as if depth might be read from its shine. She says the rings on the chart run the same way as the grain in a plank of teak, and that teak only tells you how old a tree was when it died. You tell her the island is probably just lava that cooled in circles, nothing more, and she laughs at you in the dark.

At first light the island lifts out of the haze exactly where the pencil said it would, a black cone of rock with red scree spilling down its flanks, terraced like the lines on the paper. The cracks in the lava are veined with ochre where the sun strikes them. The water beneath the hull turns from ink to jade in the length of a cable, and the lead line, dropped for the first time in six weeks, comes back with sand clinging to the tallow. Ines says nothing for once. She simply hands you the pencil.

You wait until the anchor chain is paid out and the engines fall silent, then lean over the rail with the chart folded in your back pocket. Gulls quarrel over the wake. You unfold the paper, find the spot where the ship now floats, and draw one small circle around it, careful as a child. Beside it, in your own cramped hand, you write the date and the word here.