Two side-by-side photos of a small, fine black outline circle tattoo with dotwork stippling on the inner forearm, with a cream sleeve rolled up.

Small circle tattoo on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small, hand-drawn circle sits on the inner forearm, shown in two close-up photographs against a plain pale background. The outline is thin and mostly solid, with a few stippled dots along the edge of the circle on the right-hand photograph. The ink is black on skin tone, and the cream sleeve frames the placement.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Circle Outline Ring

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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 ferry from Oban had been empty since the tide turned, and Morag Fenwick sat on the upturned creel telling the boy about the stone that rolled. You will have heard it, she said, but you have not heard it from me, and the difference is my lungs. Out past the skerry, she said, there was a flat grey stone the size of a cartwheel, and every spring the sea pushed it a little further up the beach. Nobody saw it move. They only saw it had moved. Her brother Iain swore he had watched it from the cliff for a whole week and never caught it at it, which was why he gave up and took up net-mending instead.

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The boy asked what the stone had to do with the pale circle Iain had drawn on the wall of the boathouse with a burnt stick, the one the gulls kept shitting on. Morag laughed until she coughed. That was the stone's own mark, she said, pressed into the sand the first night it came ashore, and the sea had never rubbed it out because the sea has no use for a circle. It only has use for edges. A circle has none to be worn down by.

The boy went down to the boathouse that night with a torch and a jam jar of salt water. He found the ring on the wall, thin and certain, and he traced it with one wet finger until the paint came away. In the morning the stone was a yard nearer the houses, and the ring on the wall was still there, exactly as round as it had been, which was, Morag said when she heard, the whole trick of it.