Black and white flash sheet of twelve circular geometric designs with orbits, planets and dots, each labelled with a word such as Prison, Victory or Fear.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Twelve geometric circle designs on a sheet

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of twelve circular line drawings arranged in a grid, each with a bold caption beneath it such as Prison, Fear, Matrix and Calculations. Each design uses thin fine linework for orbits, grids and rings, with solid and outlined circles standing in for planets or celestial bodies. The drawings are in pure black ink on white, with the designs evenly spaced across the page.

Geometric Circle Orbit Planet Ring Dot Line Grid Flash sheet

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 find the drawings in the tack room on the third morning of the thaw, pinned behind a feed merchant's calendar that has stopped at October. Twelve circles in black ink, each with a word typed on a strip of masking tape underneath: PRISON, VICTORY, FEAR. Your grandfather never got further than Skegness in his life, yet here are his solar systems, ruled so cleanly that he must have pushed a compass point through the paper to hold the centre.

Keep reading

Frost has got into the yard drains and the trough pump has split twice. You spend the afternoon with the sheet weighted on the tailgate of the trailer, reading the captions against the rings. DAZZLED has a black body bigger than its white neighbour, as if somebody had stared too long into the low sun over the beet clamp. OBSCURITY is a tangle of overlapping orbits with nothing clear in the middle. You wonder whether he drew them during the bad winter the bank letters came, or whether they were always going to look like that.

Then you notice the small dots sit on the same rings across every sheet, as though he had walked one orbit round the yard for forty years and marked each place the cold got in. CALCULATIONS has a hairline circle in one corner, rubbed out and redrawn three times. Under it, in pencil, someone has written 7pm and nothing else.

You pin them back up in the order you found them, PRISON top left, and go out to break the ice on the trough. Over the silo the sky is sharp enough to cut your hands, and for once you can point to where the planets sit.