Black and grey fine line tattoo of planets on elliptical orbits with small stars, on the outer thigh, held taut by a hand at the left edge.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Orbital planet diagram on a thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a large circle crossed by several elliptical orbit lines, with small planets drawn as shaded spheres and a few dotted trails. Star shapes are scattered around the edges and between the orbits. The linework is thin and the planets use light shading, all in black ink on skin, with no colour.

Fine line Geometric Thigh Planet Orbit Star Circle Solar system Dotted line

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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

Sit down before you count the drips, love, because this takes as long as the kettle. My father drove the ambulance out of Carlisle for thirty years and never once read a clock on nights. He read the sky over the car park, and he swore the planets walked across it every winter in the same order, like men filing into chapel.

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His sister Winnie was a night sister on Eden Ward, and the old men there could not sleep for their chests. So she drew them a sky. She took the back of the drug charts, the good stiff card, and ruled one great circle with a compass, then sketched the orbits as loose ellipses, one pulled wider than the rest because she said Mars never kept its place. She shaded each planet in pencil so it looked like a ball you could hold. Between the rings she put stars, and between the stars she ran dotted lines, so a man could follow where a thing had been and where it was going.

Every time a patient went home, she moved a planet a little along its track. When one died, she left its sphere where it was and gave it a dotted trail running off the edge of the card. Dad said by spring there were more dotted lines than solid ones, and nobody on the ward minded. They would ask her in the small hours where Jupiter had got to, and she would show them with her thumb on the old gap.

When she retired they gave her a carriage clock. She left the card pinned above the sluice sink, and it's still there, the ink gone the colour of weak tea. Last winter I stood in front of it with a cup going cold and found a new planet in the bottom corner, drawn in biro and not yet shaded. Winnie never could resist leaving room for the next one.