Black and grey dotwork tattoo in a circle on the side of the ribs, showing a sun over mountains, a ringed planet and a spiral galaxy.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork sun, mountains and galaxy in a circle

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A circular design divided into two scenes: a sun with rays, clouds and birds above mountains at the top, and a ringed planet beside a spiral galaxy with a pale centre below. The work is built entirely from stippled dots that create the shading, with the density increasing in the galaxy and sky to give depth. The tattoo is in black and grey on smooth skin, photographed straight on with the circle filling most of the frame.

Dotwork Ribs Sun Mountain Planet Ring Galaxy Spiral Cloud Bird Star Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The captain wanted the sky done before we raised the Falklands, and he wanted it in dots. Ruled lines, he said, made a chart look like a railway timetable. So for nine nights I sat under the binnacle lamp with a steel nib and a bottle of Indian ink, pricking the heavens one speck at a time, while Mr Pell brought me cocoa and watched the paper as though it might bite.

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The top half was easy. The sun went first, a hard black knot with its rays fanned out, then the clouds thinned to nothing as they climbed, and a scatter of birds, three quick pricks each. The mountains came last, their shoulders thick with stipple where the shadow fell. Below them the galaxy wanted the most patience. I started at the rim and worked inward, each turn of the spiral denser than the last, until the ink was nearly black at its arms and I had to leave the middle bare, a pale eye of paper where the light was meant to gather. The ringed planet went in the corner like a coin someone had dropped.

Tobias, the cabin boy, asked why I was leaving a hole in the middle of everything. I told him the eye needs somewhere to rest, or the whole picture gets too loud to read. He thought about that and then asked whether the sun was really that small. I said no, only in the drawing. It was as big as it needed to be to warm the mountains and no bigger, and that was the trick of it.

On the last night I finished the birds and sealed the sheet with a breath of varnish. The captain held it up to the lamp and found the planet's ring by squinting. He said nothing for a while. Then he folded it into his coat, where it stayed through the whole long passage home.