Black and grey fine line and dotwork penguin tattoo inside circles and crosshair lines on a man's forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Penguin within geometric circles on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A standing penguin in profile sits at the centre of the design, with its head turned to the right and shading built from fine stippled dots. Thin dashed circles, crosshair lines and a small circle at the base frame the bird like a technical diagram. The image is in black and grey, shot close up on a pale forearm against a dark background.

Fine line Geometric Dotwork Forearm Penguin Circle Bird Geometric frame

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 compass rose was already inked when Ruth asked me to put the penguin in the middle, and she was clear that nowhere else would do. I had spent three nights on the arcs for the Dundee harbour survey, and every night the dashed circles bled into the margin no matter how steady I held the dividers. Now she wanted a bird standing on the crosshair like a tide gauge.

Keep reading

Nobody at the office ever asked why a penguin belonged on a harbour chart. Ruth only said her father had sailed the South Georgia run before the war, and that he had drawn birds in the corners of every sheet he signed. She kept his old brass dividers in a Peek Frean biscuit tin under the drawing-board lamp. Once the trams had stopped and the streetlights had turned the window glass to wet slate, I pinned the linen tracing flat and began with the beak, building the shadow of the back out of dots so fine the nib hardly touched the paper.

By two in the morning the bird was done, standing side-on with its head turned to the right. The outer circles had gone on last, thin and exact, with the small circle at the foot holding it steady like a plumb line. Ruth came in from the cold with a flask and looked at the sheet for a long time without saying anything.

She finally tapped the edge of the paper where the bird was facing. There was nothing there but clean white margin. "He always looked for the open water first," she said, and went to fill the kettle.