Fine line black tattoo of a molecular structure with a fused ring and side chain on a thigh, shown against a maroon top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Molecular structure on a thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A single-line drawing of a chemical structure, made of a fused double-ring with a hydroxyl group and a two-carbon chain ending in a further hydroxyl group, sits on the upper thigh. The linework is thin, uniform and black, with no shading, and the ring interiors are left as open outlines. The tattoo is centred on pale skin, with a maroon top and dark patterned fabric around it.

Fine line Thigh Molecule Chemical structure Line drawing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Pryce draws it for you on the back of a repeat prescription card while the kettle goes cold behind him. A ring of six, a second ring fused to the first like two coins pressed edge to edge, and a thin tail with a bead on the end. You are nineteen and still have ink on your second finger from the labels, and you think it looks like a bicycle someone has folded up to fit in a cupboard.

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"The ring is the part that matters," he says. "The tail is only where the thing hooks on." You ask what it hooks onto. He taps the card with the back of his pen. Nerves, he says, the little messengers that run from one end of a body to the other, and a chemical that carries the news and then gets tidied away before it can outstay its welcome. Outside the shop window Tuesday market is packing up: canvas flapping, a man hosing fish scales into the gutter on Church Street, the bell of St Mary's striking eleven.

In April a letter comes from your brother Jim in Halifax. He has drawn you something on thin airmail paper, two rings and a tail, and written underneath that he copied it from a pamphlet the university sent, and that the tail is the bit he cannot pronounce. You read it twice at the counter, then fold it along its creases and put it in the drawer with the poison register, where it sits between the bottles of syrup of figs and the key you forgot to turn.

That night, after the shop is shut and the blinds are down, you take a pencil and copy the outline into the back of your notebook, ring by ring. You keep the pressure light so it will rub out clean, and you leave the tail until last, the bead at its end just a small round nothing, a dot you can close later if you need to.