Black dotwork drawing of a man's face inside a circle, with a red lightning bolt crossing the head and face.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stippled portrait in a circle with red lightning bolt

Dotwork · Mixed · Flash

A drawn portrait of a man's face, shown in a three-quarter view inside a black circular frame. The face is built from fine stippled dots, with heavier shadow along the jaw, neck and hair. A flat red lightning bolt and red linework run diagonally across the head and face, and the background is plain white.

Dotwork Portrait Face Man Lightning bolt Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry put him ashore on the wrong tide, a man with a leather roll of pens and a tweed coat that had seen better weather. I was on the slipway with the barometer case when he asked whether the lightning still came in off the Skerrin bank in August. I told him it did, and that I logged every strike in red crayon because the black ink ran in the damp.

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He stayed three nights in the spare room above the fog bell. Each evening he sat at my kitchen table and stippled tiny dots onto a circle of card, patient as someone counting rain. I asked why dots and not lines. He said lines were for people who were sure of what they were looking at. Dots let the eye do the work, and the eye, given enough of them, would make a face out of nothing.

On the third night the storm came over the bank, the first proper one of the year. The bell rang, the lamp flickered, and I went out to count. Seven strikes, then eight. When I came back he had drawn a bolt in red across the face he had been building, a hard zigzag that cut straight through the cheek and out past the rim of the circle, and he was grinning like a boy who had got away with something.

He left on the morning boat and took none of his drawings. I pinned the card above the barometer. Over the years the dots along the jaw went darker from handling and damp, and the red bolt faded to the colour of old rust. Every August I log the strikes in red, and every August I look up at the circle and count the dots that were there before the weather got into them.