Fine line black tattoo of a benzene ring with two OH groups and an NH2 group on the inside of a wrist.

Dopamine molecule tattoo on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hand is shown palm up with the wrist facing the camera. A thin black single-needle outline shows a chemical structure: a six-sided ring with two OH groups and a chain ending in NH2, which appears to be the dopamine molecule. The linework is clean and even, with no shading, and the design is small and centred on the wrist against plain skin.

Fine line Forearm Molecule Chemical structure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Long after the rivers turned to glass, the people of Hollin Reach taught their children one rule before their letters. A thing that makes you reach is a messenger, and messengers must be drawn so they can be found again. The old women marked it on the inside of the wrist, where the blood runs close. Six corners in a ring, two water-hooks, and a tail that ends in a breath.

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Ansa Marrow got hers at nine, pricked in with soot and thorn, and she disliked it. When the ice-boats failed to return she would sit on the sea wall, turn her wrist over and feel the wanting pull her toward the grey water. She thought the drawing was a hook. Her grandmother said it was a door.

The winter the lamp-well froze, Ansa was sent down on the rope. The last keeper had gone quiet in the dark, and nobody could say why. She followed the wanting past the ledges until she found him sitting upright, his hand open on his knee, gazing at nothing. She pressed her wrist against his and said the words the women used, that the messenger was not a hunger but a road. Slowly his fingers closed. He looked up as if she had been gone a long time. "I want the light," he said.

At the top the sky was full of cold stars. Ansa rubbed the ring on her wrist with her thumb, six corners, two hooks, one breath, and found she was no longer afraid of the drop. The keeper laughed beside her, and that, she decided, was the road after all.