It's easy for us to visualize a 2-d sheet being distorted into the 3rd spacial dimension we perceive. It's not so easy to visualize that sheet being distorted within its 2-d plane. We could use color to show the magnitude of distortion, or a vector field to show both magnitude and direction of distortion.

I found this. I don't like it much, but I do like it a little.


Then there's this:

which at least has a clock at each intersection.