Small dark geometric tattoo on the outer forearm of a woman whose face is hidden behind a camera, with silver rings and bracelets on her wrists.

Woman with camera and small forearm tattoo

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with long hair holds a Canon DSLR camera up to her face, so her face is not visible, and she wears silver rings, bracelets and a loose white patterned cardigan. A small dark tattoo on her right forearm shows a circle with interlocking lines and a diagonal stroke, drawn in black ink with fine linework and little shading. The composition is a soft, muted-colour outdoor shot with a pale sky and calm water behind her.

Forearm Camera Woman Circle Line Bracelet Ring Water

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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 arrive at the fair on the last Tuesday of September, when the wind off the estuary has already learned the names of the rides. The gaff man hands you a steel tape because the surveyor's chain has gone missing, and he swears the waltzer is two inches out of true. You kneel on wet tarmac with a notebook and find that every spoke of the platform meets the rim at exactly the same angle, as if someone drew it with a compass and a grudge.

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By dusk you have the trouble worked out. The ride does not wobble. It is the strings of bulbs criss-crossing between the poles, and when you stare too long the circle seems to turn the other way. The gaff man laughs and says that is why nobody under forty gets sick on it. He says the old showmen called it the Wheel That Remembers, and that it always runs one ride past closing.

At midnight you walk the perimeter with the tape. Each time you pull it taut from the centre pole, the numbers come out the same, and each time you check the notebook the figures have shifted by a single digit, as though the fair is counting you back. The last line you draw runs off the edge of the field, straight toward the black water, the only stroke in the whole plan that does not close.

You follow it to the slipway. The tape is still humming against your palm when you lay it down on the stones and let the wind have the end of it.