Three black and white geometric dotwork tattoo designs drawn on white, built from stacked triangles, diamonds and dotted shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three geometric dotwork design sketches

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows three separate geometric designs drawn in black ink on a white background, each made of stacked triangles, diamonds and nested shapes. Shading is built from fine stippled dots that fade across the larger shapes, with clean solid black lines outlining the forms and dotted vertical guide lines hanging below. The arrangement is in plain black and grey with no colour and no body part visible.

Dotwork Geometric Triangle Diamond Geometric shape Dot Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday, 14 October. The rain came off the Solent sideways again, so I worked from the lee of the chart house with the theodolite wrapped in my oilskin. Harriet Pell, the harbourmaster's niece, held the staff steady while I sighted the three beacons on the far shore. Each one stood on its own rock like a spike of black iron, and I drew them the way my tutor taught me: a stacked diamond for the first, a slim spindle for the second, and for the third an inverted pyramid that seemed to hang from nothing. Harriet asked why the lines went on below the stones, dotted, as if the sea had been measured down to the bottom. I told her they were plumb lines for the tide, which is only half true.

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Wednesday. Wind backed to the north-west and the sea went flat as a plate. From the top of the boarding house I could see the three marks lined up exactly, a fine sum of triangles and shadow, and I understood that whoever set them had not meant them as beacons at all but as a sum that came out even every time the moon was full. My landlady, Mrs Cole, says the old keeper's book has the same drawings in the back, and a date beside each that nobody can read.

Thursday. I took the dotwork pen out of my case and stippled the shading the way the keeper's book shows, one dot at a time, until my wrist ached and the grey came up under the paper like a tide coming in. The last beacon I left unfinished, its base open, a dotted line running down into the margin. Harriet will fetch the rest of the ink on Saturday. I have written to the Admiralty to say the survey is complete.