Colour tattoo of a molecular chemical structure with green shaded rings and black outlines on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chemical structure on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A chemical structure drawn as black outlines with labels such as HO and CH3 sits on the inner forearm. The rings are filled with soft green shading that gives a watercolour-like finish. The tattoo is centred on the arm against a plain background with a wicker basket and a black top at the edge of the frame.

Forearm Molecule Chemical structure Ring

Find an artist for this

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 nearer the stove, love, it's eating its coal faster than the frost is biting. Your grandfather never talked about the laboratory in Reading, not once in forty winters, but he kept a sheet of squared paper in the drawer of the kitchen dresser, and on it were six-sided rings drawn in pencil, one tucked against the next like sheep in a pen. He'd shade them with the green from your gran's old watercolour tin, soft, so the paper looked wet, and he'd tell anyone who asked that it was a thing that helped people sleep and didn't ask anything more.

Keep reading

The winter the ewes got through the hedge into the top field, he was out in the snow for two days with a lantern and a dog that wouldn't stop barking. When he came in, he sat at the table with that sheet and didn't take his boots off. Your gran asked him what he was looking at. He said the two little labels off the bottom ring, the ones with the three short bars, looked exactly like the two stone posts at the gap where his father had stood with a hurdle in every storm of his boyhood. The bridge of the ring, the little oxygen crooked over the top, was the stile he'd climbed a thousand times.

He never went back to Reading. He pinned the sheet to the beam above the byre door, where the lamp reaches it, and every January he'd stand under it with his hands in his pockets and count the rings the way you'd count fence posts after a gale. The green has faded now to the colour of grass under snow, and the pencil has gone silver. I've never once looked at it and seen a chemist's diagram, love. I see the way home.