Fine line black tattoo of a chemical structure with a benzene ring, two HO groups and an NH2 group, on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Molecular structure on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a fine line tattoo showing a chemical structure: a six-sided ring with two HO groups, linked by a short chain to NH2. The linework is thin and even, in solid black ink, with no shading. The tattoo sits off-centre on the upper back, with the subject's dark hair and the edge of the shoulder visible at the frame edges against a soft, blurred background.

Fine line Back Molecule Chemical structure Line drawing Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dr Hale never used a duster on the blackboard when he was pleased. He wiped it with the side of his hand, leaving a grey smear across the sums, and I knew from the smear that the batch had failed again. Eleven weeks of it. I was the glass-washer on the third floor of the Ashworth Laboratory in Leeds, and my job was to scrub the flasks he rejected, which meant I had read every failed attempt at the same small shape before he had.

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The shape was a ring of six corners, two of them carrying little HO labels like the hands of a clock, with a short arm reaching off the side that ended in NH2. He drew it at the start of every shift, as though repetition might persuade it to cooperate. On the Friday before the frost he drew it once more, then stood there longer than usual with the chalk held loosely in his fingers.

"It has to be in the brain, Mrs Fenwick," he said, though I had said nothing at all. "Something that makes a person want to go on wanting." He did not say what he meant to do with that thought, and I did not ask. I had a kettle to fill and a sink full of glass.

He left in October for a post in Edinburgh, and the new man wiped the board with a proper cloth. In the bottom of the last flask Hale had rejected I found a folded scrap of paper. On it he had drawn the ring in careful ink, and beneath it he had written: Not yet. Keep the arm long. I have never got the chemistry right, but I have never once drawn that arm short.