Fine line black tattoo on an upper arm of an astrological chart with planet glyphs, dotted orbit lines, a central circle and numerals.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Astrological chart tattoo on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink design of a radial astrological chart sits on the upper arm, with a central ringed circle and lines radiating outwards to planet glyphs. Dotted arcs and a dotted line curve around the design, and small numerals run along one edge. The linework is thin and even, with no shading or colour, and the design fills the middle of the arm against a plain background.

Fine line Geometric Upper arm Glyph Circle Dotted line Number Compass

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomas, the frost came early, so I've left the star bed to rest and gone out with a trowel only to the leeks. You'll remember the brass disc your grandfather set into the paving by the greenhouse, the one with the ring and spokes. I finally scraped the moss off it on Sunday. The little numbers around the edge still read 144 5°36 2 66ly, though the last figures have nearly worn away. He always said it was the distance to the patch of sky over the shed, and that the planets were only where they'd stood when he lined everything up one wet March.

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Mrs Pascoe next door swears it's a marker for a dog that died in 1981, and she may be right about the dog. What matters is his seed packets, which I found in the shed tin labelled by hand. The red symbol went on the poppies, the mirror-glass one on the pale sweet peas, and the trident-looking mark on a row of borage that never came up. Last Tuesday I pressed a line of dotted holes from the disc to the back wall, just as the dashes run on his drawing, and dropped in bulbs one at a time, counting under my breath like he used to.

This morning the first green points had come up along that line, a neat broken path running out from the brass toward the fence. I stood there in my dressing gown longer than was sensible. Somewhere out past the shed roof there's light that left its star before your mother was born, still arriving on schedule and landing on the same spot of ground. I've decided that's enough reason to keep the disc clean.

Come at Easter if the trains behave. Bring your own trowel, because I've promised Mrs Pascoe a row of cosmos and I'm not doing them alone.

Love, Aunt Wenna