Colour fine line tattoo of an atom with three orbits and blue, teal and purple watercolour splashes, on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Atom orbit tattoo on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A tattoo of an atom with three elliptical orbits drawn in fine dark linework, crossing at a central point. Soft blue, teal and purple watercolour washes and splatters surround the centre, with a few pink and orange tints along the orbit lines. The design sits on the side of the ribs, with the subject's torso and a blue top visible and the face not shown.

Fine line Ribs Orbit Splash Watercolour

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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

Sit down, love, you're letting the lift draught in. Aye, that one still sticks between four and five, same as it did in nineteen seventy-eight. I'll tell you about Mr Dunmore on the ninth floor, because he's the reason the damp patch over his bed looked like a galaxy for thirty years.

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He taught chemistry at the comprehensive until his hands started to shake, and then he sat in the flat with a box of watercolours his wife had bought for a holiday they never took. Every Tuesday his grandson came up with a crate of library books. Mr Dunmore would point at the bloom of mould on the wall and say, that's the wrong shape for a cloud, it's the shape of a thing that won't stay still. Then he'd draw. Three rings, thin as hair, crossing at one point, like three bicycle wheels thrown at the same nail.

The council sent men with white emulsion, twice. Both times the paint came off in the rain, and the blue, teal and violet came through again, splashed out round the orbits where he'd flicked the brush with his thumb. The men gave up and said the wall had been given an artist's licence. Mr Dunmore laughed so hard he had to be given a glass of water.

When they knocked the block down in two thousand and nine, the grandson asked if they could take the wall. They couldn't. But I have the drawing he did on the back of a gas bill, three pencil rings that never sit still, and I keep it in my handbag so I know where to find him.