Black and white photo of three small dot tattoos in a row on a man's upper chest, with tiny dotwork on one finger and a small X on the back of the hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three dots on the upper chest

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of three small, evenly spaced solid dots tattooed in a horizontal row on the upper chest near the collarbone. A hand rests on the chest, showing a tiny dot tattoo on one finger and a small X on the back of the hand, with a plain ring on another finger. The lighting is high contrast, the shot is cropped below the jaw, and the background is dark fabric.

Dotwork Fine line Chest Hand Dot Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The show came to Ashgrove the week the canvas went grey with damp, and by the third night there were only eleven people left to buy tickets. Ivo Penhallow, who had thrown knives for the Lantern Circus since before the war, sat on an upturned crate and told the girl the trick was never in the blade. It was in the spacing. Three points, set a finger's width apart, so the eye could take them in at a glance and the hand could follow.

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Lorna had been his catcher for six seasons. Every evening she stood against the painted board with her arms out, and every evening he drew three dots of ink on her with a pen dipped in pine tar, then a small cross on the back of her hand where she was to keep her palm turned. The crowd loved the cross. They did not know it was only a way of telling her she could stop shifting her weight, because the board was older than the ground it stood on and leaned to the left.

On the last night his hands would not keep still. He drew the dots crooked and threw wide, and the first blade sang past her ear and stuck in the wood. The second took the hem of her skirt. The third went into the painted circle at the exact middle of the sky, where nobody could have aimed it, and the old men at the front stood up and clapped as if it had been planned all along. Lorna did not move. She had learned that much from Ivo.

In the morning he sold the board for kindling and the caravans for scrap, and Lorna kept the three blades. Years later she ran a bakery in a town with no circus at all. When customers asked about the dots on her hand, she said they were a count of the sums she had been paid, and the count was always short.