Black line drawing of a stacked tribal-style design with a star wheel, a nested diamond and a spiral, shown without any body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stacked star, diamond and spiral design

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A vertical stack of three black line motifs on a white background. At the top, a circle holds an eight-pointed star between two crescents, and at the centre a diamond contains nested square outlines. At the base, a spiral sits inside a circle flanked by crescents, all drawn in solid black strokes with no shading.

Geometric Star Diamond Spiral Crescent Circle Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The old chart of the Skerrow Sound had been drawn by a man who hated to be wrong, so he marked every bad place with a sign instead of a name. My job, that October, was to copy the signs onto the new survey before the printers came from Aberdeen. Mr Tallack, who had taught me the work, sat with his pipe unlit and told me which sign went where.

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At the top of the sheet, above the rocks, was the compass star inside its two moons, the mark for a lee shore where the tide could carry a hull onto the Carrick ledge. The diamond with its nested squares was for the slack water inside the bar, the safe basin where a boat could wait out the flood. And at the foot, the spiral, for the whirl off Gull Head, where the current turned on itself and kept whatever it took.

I asked him why the diamond sat in the middle. He said the safe water always lay between the dangers, and that a sailor who knew only the star would drown looking for the spiral. I drew the three signs in Indian ink, steady, the way he had shown me, and when I finished he took the nib from my hand and blotted the last curl himself.

Two nights later the Morven came round the point in a northerly, her lamp swinging, and her skipper steered for the diamond as if he had drawn it himself. I watched from the window with the chart flat under my palms. Nobody needed the spiral that night. Tallack's signs had done what they were meant to do, which was to keep us from having to read the sea twice.