Fine line black tattoo of overlapping atomic orbital diagrams, with solid and dashed circles and ellipses, across the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Atomic orbital diagram on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a back with a tattoo of overlapping orbital diagrams, drawn as circles and ellipses in solid and dashed fine lines. Small labels and cross marks sit within the rings, and a central dot links the shapes with straight lines. The thin, even linework is in black ink only, and the design spreads diagonally from the shoulder blade towards the centre of the upper back.

Fine line Geometric Back Circle Dashed line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Carrick House could say how the lift learned its way. Old Mrs Ferris, who had lived on the ninth floor since the blocks went up, said the building had been drawn first, on the back of a napkin, by a man who believed everything near a centre keeps to its circles. She said this to Dev, who was eleven and wanted the lift to take him to the fourteenth floor, where his mother worked nights and did not answer the intercom.

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Mrs Ferris took a grease pencil from her apron and drew on the steel wall of the lift. She drew a small ring, then a bigger one that crossed it, then a fat shape like a dumbbell laid on its side. Where the lines met she made a cross. 'Solid rings are where you can be and everyone can see you,' she said. 'Dashed rings are where you can be and nobody has to look. The middle, where they all knot together, is where the lift will not stop. You only stay there when you are not going anywhere.'

That night Dev pressed fourteen and nothing happened. He pressed it again. The lift hummed, slid sideways between the ninth and tenth floors like a bead on wire, and stopped at the place with the cross. The doors opened onto the laundry room in the basement, where the dryers turned in their round windows and his mother was folding a sheet with her back to him, humming. She had come down to be near the machines, she said, because the flat was too quiet, and she had been in the building all evening on a floor nobody bothered to number.

Mrs Ferris said that was the trouble with the middle. You could find people there who were never quite lost and never quite found. Dev took the grease pencil home and drew a dashed ring on his bedroom wall, and when his mother asked what it was, he said it was a map of where the lift would take them if they were patient.