Fine-line black tattoo of a chemical structure with HO and NH2 labels on the inner wrist, above beaded bracelets.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chemical structure tattoo on the wrist

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A fine-line black tattoo shows a chemical structure, with a fused six-sided and five-sided ring, a chain ending in NH2, a label reading HO, and an NH label at the lower ring. The linework is thin and even, in black ink only. The black and white photograph is taken close up on the inner wrist, with layered beaded cord bracelets sitting above the tattoo.

Fine line Other Chemical structure Molecule Wrist Bracelet Bead Line drawing

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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

Dearest Maren, the Duke's clerk has returned my drawing for the third time, saying a hexagon is not a flower and the Chamber of Cures will not pay for a picture of a thing it cannot weigh. I have pinned it above my bench anyway. Five sides fused to six, like two hands clasped in the dark, and from one corner a crooked chain running out to a cluster of letters, NH two, which old Tobiah at Sallow Ford swears is the breath of the marsh.

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Tobiah grinds his powders in the cellar and does not trust anything he cannot taste. Yet he told me the shape came to him in a dream of the lake, where the fishermen's wives sit up on the jetty every night until the boats are counted in. When he brews his bitter bark for them, they sleep, and he says the bark carries the shape inside it the way a bell carries its note. The clerk wants a number for that. Tobiah says the number is the wives' faces in the morning, and nobody has yet written a column for faces.

So I went down to the water at first light with the drawing folded in my apron and a jar of the bark tea. The lake lay flat as a slate. I unfolded the paper on the reeds, and a grey heron walked out and stood in the open ring of the molecule as if it had been measured for it. It did not move while the sun cleared the far hills. When it finally lifted, I saw the chain of letters had left a faint wet mark on the page where its foot had pressed.

I have stopped writing to the clerk. I am posting you the drawing, so you can hold it to the window and watch the light pass through the rings. Keep the stain as it is. It is the only honest measurement I have made this year.