Cosmic planet tattoo on a back

Ned Carrow was a tinsmith in Wapping Row, and he made his living from those holes. Each winter he hammered small worlds out of scrap copper and sold them to sailors who wanted something to watch on the night watch. Saturn with its loose ring. A striped Jupiter. A pale moon that rattled when shaken. He had one rule: never make a world you would not be willing to lose.

His daughter Maud never listened to rules. She took a sheet of teal-dyed brass from the warehouse and beat out a planet bigger than her father's hand, then another, then a third, binding them with swirls of pink wire so they would turn in a draught. On the night of the spring tide she carried them down the slipway in a basket and let the sea have them, one by one, while the gulls screamed at her from the wall.

Ned searched the strand for a month and found nothing. Then, on a grey morning in April, a fisherman brought him a yellow star wrapped in weed, still warm from being turned over and over in the surf. Maud was already gone to Cardiff with a sailor. Ned hung the star above his bench, and every night after that, when the tide came round the bottom of the pier, he went out with a lantern and watched the foam carry small bright things back up the stones.