Black ink drawing of lips with teeth biting the lower lip, filled with geometric zentangle-style patterns, on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Patterned lips drawing

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a pair of lips with the upper teeth resting on the lower lip. Each lip is filled with dense, repeating geometric patterns of arcs, spirals, dots, chevrons and hatched bands, with the shading built up in fine stippling. The design is drawn in black ink on white paper, centred on the page with a wooden surface visible at the edges.

Geometric Dotwork Lip Teeth Pattern Spiral Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mam never let me near the good brushes, so I learned the patterns with a biro on the backs of raffle tickets. Every booth on the circuit needed a painted board, and she said a board with nothing on it was just a plank that wanted to be somewhere else. The speaking-tent had a mouth on its sign: a pair of lips inked so thick with swirls and chevrons you could lose an afternoon reading them, and between them the front teeth, pressed down on the bottom lip as if something had been bitten back before it got out.

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I drew the spirals first, always from the outside in, because Mam said a spiral started at the edge and ended wherever your nerve gave out. Dots went where the lamp would catch them. Arcs ran along the top lip like the ribs of a boat, and I hatched the shadows underneath with a pencil so soft it smudged if you breathed on it. Ottilie, who sat behind that mouth and read palms for pennies, said very little that was worth repeating, but she liked the sign enough to ask for a fresh coat every spring.

The summer I was fourteen we pitched in a village where the church bell rang for the wrong funeral, and Ottilie went quiet for two days. On the third morning she climbed the steps of our wagon holding the raffle tickets I had filled and said I had drawn her mouth exactly as it was, shut tight on something it would not say. She took the biro from my hand, added one small dot at the corner, and the tent rolled out before noon.

I still have that ticket. The dot is the only mark on it I didn't make.