Fine line black tattoo of a chemical structure running across the top of a bare foot, with rings and bonds, photographed on weathered wooden decking.

Molecular diagram tattoo on a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot rests on weathered wooden planks, showing a black linework tattoo of a chemical structural formula that runs from the top of the foot towards the ankle. The lines are thin and even, with hexagonal and pentagonal rings, bond lines and small atom labels drawn in solid black ink. The ink is the only colour in the frame, set against the grey wood and pale skin, and the tattoo is shown from a slightly angled, close viewpoint.

Fine line Other Chemical structure Molecule Ring Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ivy sketched the molecule on the back of her dance card because the band had stopped and the hall smelled of wet wool and hair oil. She had drawn it so often for Mr Hadley's evening classes that her pencil went round the rings without asking her. The five-sided ring sat at the top like a bent thumb, the six-sided one hung open at the side, and the little chain of amide links ran down the card like a row of paper clips. Across the floor the men from the gasworks were tugging at their cuffs, and nobody had asked her yet.

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Then Walter crossed the boards with two lemonades, not dancing, just holding the glasses out like evidence. He studied the card and said the nitrogen on the end ring was on the wrong corner. Ivy said it was how the textbook had it. He said the textbook had been written by a man who had never worked a night shift on a distillation column, and that he had spent three winters making the stuff that lived at the end of her pencil. He was wrong about the corner, but he was right that the book had never mentioned how it smelled.

They danced the last waltz with the card folded between them. Halfway through the second turn she took his hand and drew the corrected nitrogen across his palm with the stub of her pencil, a small hexagon that tickled. In the morning he came into the lab with the mark still there, slightly smudged, and asked Mr Hadley to check his working.