Fine line black tattoo of two outstretched hands framing a sun, crescent moon and planets, including a ringed planet, on the inner upper arm.

Celestial hands with planets on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A fine line tattoo shows two long-nailed hands, one reaching down from above and one rising from below, with a radiating sun, a crescent moon, a ringed planet and smaller dotted spheres hung between them on dotted lines. The linework is thin and even, with dotwork used for the planet shading. The tattoo is in black ink only and sits centrally on the inner upper arm against a plain pale background.

Fine line Dotwork Upper arm Hand Sun Moon Crescent moon Planet Saturn Celestial Dotted line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The apple trees at Coldharbour had given nothing for three summers, and by August the men had stopped hoping for them. Maud Tindall came up the track on the last Sunday of the month with a sack of kitchen string over one shoulder and asked for the top field, the one nobody would farm. Nobody asked her why. They handed her the scythe and went home to their suppers.

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She strung the trees that evening. Thread ran from branch to branch, and on each one she hung something from the sack: a stone the colour of a bruise, a clot of gold wax, a dull iron bead, a ring of tin no bigger than a thumbnail. Her granddaughter Edie, who was eleven and sulky about being dragged out, asked what they were for. "Worlds," Maud said. "They want the sun in the middle, or they fall."

Edie woke after midnight and went out in her nightdress. In the top field two hands were at work. One came down out of the dark sky, long-fingered, the nails black as sloes. The other rose through the grass from under the ground, its palm pale as a candle. Between them they lifted a red disc from the branches and turned it slowly, and the little worlds swung on their threads and did not touch the grass. The hands never looked at her. They moved like a steward counting stock at the autumn fair.

In the morning every tree was heavy and the apples were round and sound. Maud took the sack down from the gate post and found it empty. Edie found a single tin ring lying in the grass by her bare foot, and she kept it in her pocket for the next thirty years, long after the orchard was sold and the trees were cut for firewood.