Black and grey fine line tattoo of three stacked vertebrae inside dotted circles and guide lines on the inner forearm.

Three vertebrae with geometric lines on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows three stacked vertebrae drawn with detailed shading, each set inside a thin dotted circle. Dotted vertical and diagonal guide lines run through the design and extend past the bottom vertebra, with a faint arc behind the top one. The work is in black ink and grey tones on a pale forearm, photographed straight on against a plain grey shirt and a dark chair.

Fine line Dotwork Geometric Forearm Bone Circle Dotted line Geometric line Spine

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

The dividers are cold in your hand at four bells, and the chart table smells of lamp oil and wet wool. You have been drawing the same dotted line for nine days, a pencil track laid from the Azores towards a coast that exists only as figures in the pilot book. Each noon sight shifts it a fraction. Each fraction you rub out and draw again.

Keep reading

The three bones came aboard in a biscuit tin at Ponta Delgada, wrapped in oilskin by a whaler who said they were from a finback his grandfather had cut up off Pico. You did not ask him to explain. You set them on the chart table beside the parallel rulers, and the second mate kept knocking them with his elbow until you moved them into the drawer. Each one is the size of a child's fist, pitted and ridged, and you scratched a faint compass arc around each so the cook would stop asking what they were for.

On the ninth night the glass falls and the wind backs into the north-west. You stand in the wheelhouse with your hands flat on the rail and count the swell by the rhythm of the hull, the way the old masters taught you to count a sleeping man's breath. Somewhere below, the bones knock together in the drawer like dice.

At dawn the sun comes up dead ahead, close enough to your line that you could lay a ruler along it. You take up the pencil, carry the track one more hatch past the last fix, and let it run on past the edge of the paper into the blank margin where nothing has been charted yet.