Black and white symmetrical design inside a circle, with stylised creature forms, ovals and a central diamond, shown as a flat drawing rather than a tattoo on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Symmetrical circular black and white design

Black and grey · Flash

A flat, symmetrical black and white design enclosed in a bold circular border. Stylised creature-like forms with eye shapes, ovals and curved linework fill the circle around a central diamond motif. The design uses solid black areas with white negative space and no shading or colour.

Circle Symmetrical design Creature Eye Diamond Oval

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

You have sanded the same cedar disc for three days, and the salt wind keeps settling on the fresh oil, so you wipe it down again before dawn. Ilse at the boatshed says a face carved in a circle must be looked at from every side before it is finished, or it will only ever look one way. You have looked at it from the bench, from the doorway, from the rocks where the gulls sit. The two watchers facing each other across the middle are nearly done, their hooked beaks cut to the same depth, their eyes ringed like knots in a tree you cannot forget.

Keep reading

The diamond at the centre is the hard part. Every line you cut into it has to answer the curves on either side, and twice you have taken a chisel to it at night and found the shape had shifted by morning. Ilse's people say the middle is where the two sides agree. You do not believe that kind of talk, but you have noticed that when you stop trying to make the diamond true and simply follow the grain, the whole disc holds still.

On the last evening the ferry horn sounds twice, which means someone has come for the crate of paddles, and you carry the disc down to the slip still wrapped in sacking. Ilse's grandson steps off first and asks what you have made. You lift the sacking and he tilts his head left, then right, the way you have been doing all week. You want to tell him it is finished. Instead you hand it over and say, stand where I am standing and tell me which of them is looking at you.

He stands for a long time while the tide turns under the pilings. Then he laughs, says both of them, and holds the disc up so the low sun comes through the cut lines and throws a small bright diamond onto the water.