Fine line black ink tattoos of a moon and three planets, one ringed like Saturn, on the fingers of a hand with black nails.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four small planet tattoos on fingers

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand with black painted nails rests on a bag, showing four tiny tattoos, one on each finger from the index to the little finger. From left to right they show a cratered moon, a banded planet, a globe-like planet and a ringed planet resembling Saturn. The thin, even outlines are in black ink with minimal shading, and the small motifs are set against the skin and a green and black background.

Fine line Hand Moon Planet Saturn Space Globe

Find an artist for this

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

The orrery lost its Moon the week the shop flooded, so Ada Pell spent January rummaging through the cigar tins under the counter, sorting buttons, bent hat pins and watch parts that nobody had claimed in forty years. Her grandfather had built the thing from odd brass fittings and a tin of paint, and every planet on its arms had a personality. Earth was a painted globe with a chipped Atlantic. Jupiter wore its bands like a bad jumper. Saturn had lost its ring to a sneeze in 1987 and never got it back.

Keep reading

She found the Moon on the fourth day, in a bag of loose pearl buttons, a grey bead of cast metal that she had to file with a nail file until it sat true on its wire. She pitted it with the tip of a dressmaker's pin, crater by crater, until it looked less like a replacement and more like something that had been struck many times and kept going. Her grandfather would have said that was the point.

On the Saturday a boy came in with a broken bicycle bell and asked whether the old machine was for sale. He did not look at the planets. He looked at the hand crank, which she had oiled that morning, and asked if it still ran. She told him it ran slow, that it needed someone patient to turn it, and that the trick was to stop trying to hurry the planets along.

He turned it anyway. The Moon swung round the Earth on its little wire, catching the lamp, and for once every body on the arm moved at the speed it was meant to.