I was thinking about textures that are traditionally called Islamic or Moorish tilings.

One simple pattern is built by placing circles on a staggered grid, placing points around their circumferences, and then connecting points to neighboring circles in a pre-defined pattern. Here’s one example:

I was thinking – hey, what if I vary the radius of those circles from row to row?

Three hours of clumsy Javascripting later, I found the answer:

(click on image to see detail)

Unfortunately, it often takes hours of coding to learn that an idea’s not much good.

You can play with some of the variables yourself, or (horrors) look at the source code to see how it works.

Updated:
I couldn’t leave well enough alone, and have added a few features. And I’m getting slightly more interesting stuff now.
(click on image to see detail)