Fine line black tattoo of a chemical molecule with benzene rings running across the top of a bare foot, with pink toenail polish, on green grass.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Molecular structure tattoo on a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot rests on green grass, showing a black line tattoo of a chemical structure with hexagonal rings, bonds and small atom labels. The linework is fine and even, with no shading, and the design runs from the ball of the foot toward the outer side of the foot. The image is in natural colour, but the tattoo itself is solid black ink, and the pink toenail polish is the only other strong colour in the frame.

Fine line Other Foot

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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

Tuesday, 14 March. Finch has been drawing on the fume hood glass again with a grease pencil, and the caretaker has given up asking him to stop. Today it is a chain of little hooks, each one a carbon with its tail of hydrogens, ending in a hexagon with a circle sealed inside it like a coin in a pudding. He calls it the handshake. I asked him whose hand. He said it was whichever part of the molecule had the most patience.

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I have spent three weeks weighing powder into glass vials that rattle like teeth. Each one goes in the cold cupboard under the sink with a label in my capitals. Finch checks them at four with his thumb on the lid, never his fingers. He says the bonds are the only honest part of anything, that they hold or they don't, and nobody needs to be sorry about it afterwards.

On Friday the grease pencil ran off the glass in the rain that came through the skylight. When I came in there was a pale smear across the hexagon, and the chain had folded itself, one link curling back on the next, so the ring sat against the first hook like a heel pressed to a stair. I stood there with the kettle in my hand and thought that a thing could be complete and still look as if it was leaving.

I copied it into this book before the mop came round. Then I put the pencil back in Finch's pot, labelled the page in my capitals, and wrote the date with the wrong year, which I have left as it is.