Black line drawing of a geometric tattoo design, stacked circles, triangles and dots on a plain grey background, with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vertical geometric design of circles and triangles

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A vertical arrangement of black geometric shapes sits centrally on a plain grey background. It includes a dot inside a ring at the top, a large outlined circle, upward and downward triangles, a solid filled triangle, a small dot and angled line strokes at the base. The thin, even linework contrasts with the solid black fill of the central triangle.

Geometric Circle Triangle Dot Line Geometric shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow has been falling since Tuesday, and by the third night the landlady has stopped apologising for the draught under the taproom door. You are the only guest left who isn't a drover, so she gives you the room at the top of the stairs, the one with the plumb line still hanging from a nail in the ceiling. Nobody has taken it down since the surveyors left in October. It hangs straight as a sentence, a thin black thread ending in a weight.

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You wind the thread up at night because it keeps catching the lamp. On the wall beside the window someone has pencilled a column of marks: a dot, a ring, a ring, a point, then a point turned upside down, as though the house was being measured for something it had not yet become. The landlady's son says the old surveyor used to sit where you are sitting and draw the shapes in ink, one above another, until the paper ran out of room and he had to start a second sheet.

On the fourth morning the thaw has not come, but the plumb line has moved. It sits a finger's width off true, and the weight touches the floorboards exactly where the dot was drawn. You kneel, put your eye to the gap between the boards, and see a chalk arrow pointing down into the cellar, the way the lines on the wall have always pointed.

You go down with the lamp. The cellar is dry and smells of apples, and there, under a shelf of jars, is a second thread, tied to a brass ring in the flagstone, waiting for someone to count the distance down. You stand with the weight swinging in your hand until it steadies, then you write the number on your palm, because the snow is still falling and the road is still gone.