Fine line tattoo of a molecular structure with HO and NH2 labels on the inner wrist, shown in two photographs.

Chemical structure tattoo on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small chemical structure diagram with a hexagonal ring, two HO labels and an NH2 group is tattooed on the inner wrist. The linework is thin and even, in dark purple ink, and the close-up shows crisp single-line bonds and lettering. The left photo shows the wrist and a hand with blue nail polish against a plain wall, and the right photo is a tight crop of the tattoo.

Fine line Forearm Molecule Chemical structure Lettering

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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

The rain had been coming off the canopy of Halford Market since eight, pooling in the dip by stall fourteen, and Dina Marsh had stopped trying to keep the cardboard boxes dry. Inside them lay the leftovers of a secondary school science department that had closed in March: burettes wrapped in old newspaper, a cracked Bunsen burner, and a tin of plastic model kits with half the joints missing.

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A man in a yellow cagoule picked up a bag of grey ball joints and turned it over in his fingers. Then he lifted a sheet of paper from the bottom of the tin, where the damp had already started to bloom across the corners. It was a page of diagrams in a teacher's careful capitals. Benzene at the top, its hexagon drawn with alternating bonds. Beneath it, a smaller ring with two HO labels hanging off the upper corners and a short chain running off the side to end in NH2.

"What's this one, then?" he asked.

"Dopamine, Mr Hollis used to say, though he'd never let us call it that in a test," Dina said. "He called it the messenger. Said if you could draw the ring flat and keep the bonds honest, the rest of the molecule would sort itself out."

The man studied the page for a long time, long enough that the rain found its way through the canopy seam and dripped onto the paper. A bead of water slid down the chain, pulled a thin blue line into the margin, and kept going. Dina reached for a tissue, but the man was already folding the sheet into his breast pocket, carefully, so the ink stayed on the inside.

"Four pound," she said.

He paid in coins, six of them, and left the model kit where it was. At the edge of the stall the wet pavement shone with the reflections of the lights, and he walked off towards the bus stop with his hand flat over his pocket, as if the page might lift away in the wind.