Black line tattoo of an atom with a clustered nucleus and solid and dotted orbits on the inner forearm, in fine line style.

Atom diagram on an inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows an atom with a small cluster of circles at the centre, three solid oval orbits with small electron dots, and several dotted orbit paths spreading out around it. The linework is fine and even, in black ink with no shading, and the design is centred on the inner forearm against a plain, light skin tone. The background is softly blurred, with a white cup and dark objects visible at the edges.

Fine line Forearm Orbit

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wasps had worked out the drop before any of us did. Every evening in the last week of August they came off the Bramley windfalls under the old pear tree and circled the same three yards of grass, fast, then slow, looping out to the hedge and back, as if someone had pinned the orchard to a dinner plate and spun it. Dad would have had a diagram of it on the back of an envelope by teatime.

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He taught chemistry at the grammar school for thirty-one years and never let a pupil leave the room without drawing the atom, a little knot of protons at the centre and the electrons running on their tracks. "Solid where they're sure of themselves," he used to say, tapping the board, "dotted where they're only probably there." I thought it was the sort of joke you only make to people who already love you. I was sorting his notebooks in the potting shed when I found the page: six solid orbits, six dotted, and beside them the apple counts for each row of trees, year by year.

The last entry was from the spring he went into hospital. The dotted lines had been traced over so often the biro had gone through the paper. Underneath, in the careful hand of a man who had marked ten thousand exercise books, he had written that the fruit comes down wherever the ground happens to be, and the wasps always know where the sugar is.

I have stopped looking for the pattern. I am going to pick up the windfalls before they rot, one at a time, and let the wasps keep their circuits around the pear tree.