Colourful geometric tattoo of overlapping pentagons and a hexagon in pink, blue, orange, mint and black, with thin black outlines, on a forearm.

Overlapping colour polygons on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm carries a small tattoo of overlapping polygons, including pentagon and hexagon shapes, filled with flat pink, blue, orange, mint green and black. Fine black outlines define each shape and an inner set of orange lines sits within the hexagon on the right. The skin is shown against a blurred black and grey background of stylised lettering.

Geometric Forearm Hexagon Polygon Abstract shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fourth tile from the doorway had cracked along a line nobody had drawn, so Ruth knelt on the wet floor of the Pavilion Baths and counted the hexagons again. There were forty-one in the border, and a pentagon every ninth place where the pattern turned back on itself. The foreman, a man called Dessie who sucked boiled sweets, said the council wanted the whole thing lifted and skipped for the car park by Friday.

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She had found the drawings in a biscuit tin behind the cistern. Someone, a long time ago, had sketched the floor in gouache on squared paper, colouring each shape a different flat hue: rose, cobalt, tangerine, a green like mint sweets, and black where the light never reached. The overlapping pieces were the clever part. A hexagon sat half under a pentagon, and where they crossed, the tile had been cut twice, once for each shape.

She spent the evenings matching the paper to the floor, scraping grime with a butter knife until the colours surfaced. On the Thursday, under the orange hexagon in the far corner, she found a single tile with a small pencilled initial and the year 1961. Beneath it, in the same hand, someone had written: Keep the overlap. Nobody sees where it begins.

Ruth left the tile in place and told Dessie the crack was structural. He shrugged and wrote it on his clipboard. On Friday the floor stayed where it was, the scratched pink and the cut-twice green glowing under the skylight, and Ruth walked out past the turnstiles with the tin under her arm.