Black line atom tattoo with a blue and green nucleus and small dot electrons, shown on the upper back.

Atom with orbits on the upper back

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The tattoo depicts an atom, with a cluster of blue and green spheres forming the nucleus at the centre. Several thin black elliptical orbits cross around it, each carrying small dot electrons at their ends. The linework is dark and fairly bold, with light grey shading along some orbits, while only the nucleus carries colour, set against lightly freckled skin.

Back Orbit

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sea wind had got into the back bedroom again, lifting the corner of the lino, and when I went up to strip the bed for Mrs Tully I found a drawing pinned to the wardrobe door with a drawing pin I didn't recognise. It was an atom, done in blue biro and grey pencil, with a lumpy little cluster of coloured beads in the middle and loops of black line going round it like hoops on a barrel.

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Mr Halloran had stayed with me six weeks in the spring. He had taught physics at the grammar school until his knees gave out, and every evening he came down to the breakfast room with his notebook and talked to me about things I had no call to know. The electrons, he said, were not little planets. They were more like a fog that you could only ever pin down as a chance, and the rings were just a kindness we did for children who needed something to hold.

I was cross about the unpaid fortnight, and I said so when I found the room empty and the rent envelope left under the teapot with nothing in it but the drawing folded small. I was going to put it in the bin with the coal ash. Instead I took it down to the scullery and tacked it to the back of the door beside the tide tables, where the steam from the copper keeps it soft at the corners.

Every morning when I turn the kettle on, those little dots still go round and round the nucleus, never once landing where they were the day before.