Two black dotwork tattoos on the wrists, a row of planet-like circles with a ringed planet on the left wrist and scattered star dots on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Planet and star dots on both wrists

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two small black tattoos sit on the inner wrists, photographed from above against pale skin. The left wrist shows a horizontal line of solid dots of varying sizes, with one larger circle crossed by a ring, resembling a planet with a ring. The right wrist has a few scattered dots arranged loosely, like a star pattern, and both designs use crisp, solid black ink with no shading.

Dotwork Forearm Planet Saturn Star Dot Constellation

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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

Hold the lantern lower, lad, or the ink will run before you have counted them. Seven moons, you say? Count again. The sky has never been flattered by a boy who rounds up.

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Brother Osric kept the star-room for forty winters, and he taught me the way his own master taught him. The big round one there, with a hoop cut across its middle like a bishop's collar, is the Sieve-Bearer. Every planet in our ledger has a name and a debt. The little ones strung beside it are its daughters, and they are always the first to go missing when the cellarer wants a candle. So we pinned them on paper, and when the paper was sold to mend the north roof, we had to pin them somewhere else.

I came up the steps the next morning with lamp black on my fingers. The abbot said nothing. He only held out his own wrist, thin as a bell rope, where a few dots had faded to freckles years since. Scattered like seed, he said. That is the Cup. It was never meant to be a picture. It is for the one who must find his own way home by it.

I pressed my wrists together over the candle, and the marks would not line up. The Sieve-Bearer sat above the Cup in the wrong place, and the Cup pointed at the wrong stair. Good, said Brother Osric, licking his thumb and rubbing a smudge away. Now go and ring for Lauds before the sky thinks we have forgotten it.