Dotwork neo-traditional tattoo of a vintage theodolite and an eyeball on an upper arm, with red, yellow, blue and green geometric shapes behind it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vintage theodolite with geometric colour on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A vintage surveying instrument, a theodolite on a tripod-style base, is shaded in grey dotwork with stippled texture. An eyeball and a few dots float in the upper right, and the scene sits on a field of flat red, yellow, brown, blue and green triangles and blocks outlined in teal. The composition wraps around the upper arm, with the instrument as the central subject and the geometric shapes adding colour and movement behind it.

Dotwork Neo-trad Geometric Upper arm Dot Triangle Geometric shape

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 surveyor came up the valley road on the morning of the wedding, his brass theodolite strapped to a mule and his three-legged stool tied on top. Nobody had sent for him. He said the boundary stones between the Harrow farm and the Pennick mill had been shifted in the night, and he would not see a bride married over a crooked line.

Keep reading

The bride's mother gave him bread and a chair in the orchard. He levelled the instrument, bent to the eyepiece, and swung it slowly from the church tower to the hedge to the bridegroom's cousin, who was standing very still by the gate with a bottle under his coat. He wrote figures in a ledger while the fiddler struck up a reel without the bride and the guests grew restless.

At noon he lifted his eye from the lens and announced that the stones had not moved at all. It was the wall that had crept, a hand's width a year for forty years, and every family in the parish had been quietly leaning on it ever since. The bridegroom's father went scarlet. The bride laughed until she had to sit down on the cake table.

When the dancing started he packed his instrument into its box. On the bride's pillow he left the ledger open at a single page, the new line of the wall drawn in red ink and beside it a small circle with a dot at its centre, so that whoever read it would know someone had been watching the whole time.