Black and grey dotwork heart tattoo on the upper arm, filled with a cratered planet, a ringed Saturn, a crescent moon and four-pointed stars.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heart with planets and stars on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A heart shape on the upper arm contains a cratered planet, a ringed planet resembling Saturn, a crescent moon and several small stars. The forms are built from fine stippled dots, with heavier dot density on the shaded edges that give the planets volume. The design is in black and grey only and sits centred on the arm against a plain, dark background.

Dotwork Upper arm Heart Planet Saturn Moon Star Space

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 royal astronomer of Ysolde had no patience for lines. Every chart in the tower above the harbour was built from dots, pricked into copper with a bone point, so the sky looked breathed onto the metal rather than drawn. When her father's hands began to shake that winter, Mira inherited the point and the queen's order that the new star map be finished before the spring fleet sailed.

Keep reading

She worked through the nights under a lamp hung from the rafters. Saturn went in first, its ring a loose scatter that thickened where the shadow fell across the globe. Then the moon, a crescent cut from the dark by pricks so close they almost merged. The navigators would need the Pole and the three bright stars, and every one had to be right, so she checked each dot against the old ledgers until her eyes stung and the gulls outside sounded like hinges.

On the last night she found she had left a corner bare. She sat with the point above it for a long time. Then she pricked a heart, dense along its edges where the shading wanted weight, and filled it with the worlds she had drawn: a cratered one, a ringed one, a crescent, and a few small stars like the ones her father had taught her to find from the roof. It was the only thing on the plate no navigator would ever need.

Her father came up the stairs at dawn, one hand on the wall. He held the copper to the window and squinted at the corner for a while. The stars are in the wrong order, he said, then laughed and tapped the heart once with a shaking finger. He said nothing more about it and went back down, leaving her the rest of the morning to finish.