Fine line black tattoo of concentric circles and elliptical orbits with small dots as planets, placed on the inside of a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Orbital rings and planets on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a central cluster of concentric circles with a solid dot at the centre, surrounded by several overlapping elliptical orbits, each with small dots marking planets. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the design is laid out in a wide oval across the forearm. The ink is black on pale skin against a light, plain background.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Orbit Planet Circle Solar system Dot

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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

The wind keeps lifting the pages of the ledger you carried up to Gallow Col, so you pin its corners with the brass dividers your father left you and hold the lamp low over the paper. He always said the planets keep to their roads, that they only seem to wander when you watch them from the wrong height. Down in the valley the last farm light goes out, and the sky above the cairn is so crowded that you have to stop trying to count the stars and start counting the wanderers instead.

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You draw the first ring with the dividers, then the second, then the wide oval that swings past the others like a dropped hoop. Ilse, the shepherd's girl who came up with the flock and stayed to laugh at you, sits on a rock and tells you the orbits look like the rings a stone makes when it hits the tarn. You tell her that is exactly what a planet is, a stone that never quite lands. She throws a pebble into the dark to prove you wrong, and you both listen for it to stop, and it never does.

By the time the eastern ridge has gone the colour of weak tea, the ellipses on the page have fallen into a single line across the gap, and the small dots you marked for the planets sit exactly where the light is about to touch them. You press your thumb to the ink to keep the page from curling. The sun comes up through the col, and for a moment every ring you drew is lit at once.

You take out your pen and write your initials beside the centre dot, the way he did on the flyleaf, and then you add one more small mark at the edge of the oval where the ring turns back on itself. It is not a planet. It is the place you will be standing when you next need to find your way home.