Black and grey tattoo of an engraved hand releasing strings from which dotwork planets, including a ringed Saturn, hang across the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hand holding planets on the upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A hand with fingers spread hangs a set of fine strings, each supporting a shaded planet of varying size, with one ringed planet resembling Saturn. The hand is drawn with engraving-style hatched linework, while the planets are built from stippled dots with some banding on the largest sphere. The design is set against smooth skin in a diagonal arrangement that follows the curve of the shoulder blade.

Dotwork Fine line Back Shoulder Hand Planet Saturn String Sphere Solar system

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Pell had the orrery on her workbench for three weeks before she dared touch the strings. The brass arm had been cast to look like a hand rather than a frame, and the fingers still carried the scuffs of a thumb that had pressed too hard. Eight planets hung from silk thread, each one a fraction out of true, and the ringed one had been hanging upside down since the Coronation.

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Her grandfather had built it in a fortnight for the Mechanics' Institute in 1911, when the lecture hall still smelled of coal smoke and chalk. He had stippled every sphere with an awl, dot after dot, until the largest one looked like frost on a bedroom window. Saturn he made last, and he quarrelled with its ring for a week, because the wire kept springing back towards the palm as if it wanted to be held.

In the hollow of the hand, under a curl of old dust, she found a folded slip of paper in his cramped capitals: HANG JUPITER WHERE THE LIGHT FALLS. LEAVE THE SMALLEST FREE. She read it twice and understood nothing, then laid the note beside the window and moved the big striped planet into the grey slant of afternoon until its bands caught the glass.

She re-hung Saturn level, tightened each silk knot with tweezers, and left the tiniest moon swinging on its own thread, unclipped from the others. When she took her hand away it kept turning slowly, a little apart from the rest, the way it had turned for a hundred and thirteen years before anyone thought to ask why.