Black and grey line drawing of six rows of interlocking circles in a Gallifreyan-style circular script, each row with a small grey caption beneath it.

Six rows of circle script lettering

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows six horizontal rows of overlapping circles drawn in black linework on a white background, each cluster encoding lettering in a circular script. Each row has a faint grey caption in capital letters underneath, set in a clean sans-serif typeface. The clusters vary in size and density and are evenly spaced down the page, making it a sheet of design lettering rather than a photograph of skin.

Geometric Circle Lettering Linework

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The almanac was due at the printers on Monday, and Ruth still had six rings to draw before the frontispiece could go to the block. Her father had taught her to use the brass compass when she was nine, the needle pricking the paper so every circle landed true, and she sat at his bench now with the same tin of ink and the same lamp that buzzed when it warmed. The verse was pencilled in the margin of the proof in her own hand, O mistress mine, where are you roaming.

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Tomas had sung it on the quay the summer before he shipped out for the Baltic, badly, in a voice that carried over the gulls. He had promised letters. The first came written in a cipher of his own invention, rings within rings, and she had worked it out with a pencil and a cup of cold tea over three nights, learning that each circle was a word read from the centre outward. It was the kind of thing he would do. She had not written back in the same code, not yet.

She drew the first cluster quickly, the big ring in the middle and the smaller ones pressed against it like boats at a mooring. The second came more slowly, because the ink ran where the lines crossed and she had to wait for each one to dry before trusting the next. By the fourth row her hand had found the rhythm of the song, trip no further, pretty sweeting.

At four in the morning she wiped the nib, blew on the last ring and laid the sheet flat. Journeys end in lovers meeting, the verse said, and every wise man's son doth know it. She had never been anyone's wise man's son. She addressed the envelope to the printers, then sat for a while with her pen over a blank card meant for the Baltic post, and began, in plain capitals anyone could read, to write him a line.