Black ink lettering reading curiouser and curiouser, looped through two ringed planet outlines, on the inner forearm.

Curiouser and curiouser script with ringed loops

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the words curiouser and curiouser written in thin, handwritten script, with the second line mirrored and upside down. Two oval ring shapes loop around the lettering, resembling planets with rings. The design is in black ink with simple single-weight linework and no shading, photographed on pale skin against a patterned background.

Lettering Forearm Script Planet Ring Orbit Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last up train had gone through Thornley Junction at ten past eleven, and the only passenger left on the platform was a man in a grey overcoat holding a brass orrery the size of a grapefruit. I was the night porter that winter, which meant I was also the lost property office, the tea urn and, when required, the person who told strangers the trains would not run again before six.

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He asked whether I knew that Saturn's rings were not solid, that they were made of rubble and ice circling the planet faster than any engine. I said I knew the rings of Saturn the way I knew the timetable, from a card pinned above the kettle. He laughed, which surprised us both, and set the little planet down on the counter. One of its arms had snapped off years before, and someone had replaced it with a curl of wire so the ring would still turn.

'My daughter kept saying curiouser and curiouser,' he said, 'every time the thing spun. Alice, you know. She wrote it on the inside of the box lid, then wrote it again backwards so she could read it in the hall mirror.' He turned the box over. There in pencil were the words, the second line reversed as though seen through glass.

I had nothing to give him for it. Instead I took the pencil from the ledger and wrote the phrase on the steamed-up window of the waiting room, the second line backwards so that anyone standing outside could read it the right way round. He watched it dry slowly from the edges inward, and then he caught the 6.04 with the orrery held level in both hands, its rings still turning.