Colour tattoo on the side of a ribcage showing a black outlined triangle with a circle and vertical line, filled with blue, pink and purple watercolour washes, with faint dotted triangles behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Triangle and circle watercolour tattoo on ribs

Geometric · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A black linework triangle enclosing a circle with a vertical line sits at the centre of the design, with faint dotted triangles set behind it. The circle and parts of the triangle are filled with soft blue, pink and purple watercolour washes that bleed and drip outward. The photo is taken from the side at close range, with the tattoo placed on the ribs against a plain white background and black clothing at the lower edge.

Geometric Ribs Triangle Circle Vertical line Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart arrived in the post wrapped in oilcloth, its corners gone soft from being carried in someone's coat pocket. My father had ringed the small island of Skerrow in ink and drawn a line straight up from its middle, and beside it a triangle he had never explained. Nobody on the mainland could tell me what it meant, though old Mrs Tully swore it was a bearing and not a sign.

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I took the boat out on the first calm morning of the month, the sea flat as pewter and the gulls strangely quiet. The faint dotted triangles on the chart kept snagging my attention: three of them, one behind another, each a little larger, as if someone had tried the same shape again and again until it finally held. I lined them up against the headland and the chimney stack at Carrick Point, and the three points met on a rock that was not on any chart I owned.

The rock was wet and ringed with a pale tide-stain, round as a coin and the colour of a bruise going yellow at the edges. Wedged into a crevice was a brass tube the length of my thumb, corked with wax. Inside was a rolled sheet with the same triangle drawn in pencil and, beneath it, in my father's careful hand: you were always going to find it sideways.

I stayed on that rock until the tide climbed back over my boots, blue and pink where the sun broke through the spray. Then I rowed home with the tube in my lap, and I did not look at the chart again, because I had already seen what it had been trying to show me.