Flash sheet of twelve black and grey dotwork designs with ornamental animal heads, a crab, a lion and fish, with no body placement shown.

Twelve zodiac-style ornamental designs

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of twelve ornamental designs arranged in a grid, mostly animal heads and figures such as a ram, bull, lion, crab, goat and a pair of fish, with some abstract symmetrical motifs. The linework is built from fine stippling and dotted shading, with flowing curls, horns and spiky tendrils filling each outline. The drawings are rendered entirely in black ink and grey tones on a white background.

Dotwork Ram Bull Lion Crab Goat Fish Horn Zodiac Ornamental Symmetry

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had pinned the last of the twelve drawings to the caravan wall before the generator coughed itself quiet, and she still hadn't decided which one was wrong. The ram had its horns curled the wrong way round, she thought, or perhaps the crab was simply too pleased with itself. Outside, the Mercer brothers were rolling the Big Wheel down into its crates, shouting in the flat voice men use when the night's money has been counted.

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Her father had drawn them the winter they wintered in Hull, sitting up with a pot of Indian ink and a bag of nibs, dotting each shadow with a pin-point until the lion's mane looked like smoke. He had never explained the stippling. He said a line was a promise and a dot was a question. Nell had inherited the sheet, the box of nibs and the fair's old contract with the council, which expired on Sunday.

On the last night before the move, a boy from the hook-a-duck stall came in with a torn programme and asked which sign was his. He was ten, perhaps, with ink already on his knuckles. She showed him the goat, horns sweeping up like a pair of scythes, and the fish that were really two fish sharing one tail. He laughed at the fish and said they looked as if they were swimming away from each other.

"Yes," Nell said. "That's the trick of them." She took the drawing down, rolled it in tissue, and gave it to him for his mother's wall, because the fair was leaving and a sign that could not be carried was no use to anyone.