Black and grey fine line tattoo of planets and a ringed Saturn running down the inner forearm, with a sun ray motif at the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Planet series on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A row of planets, including a ringed Saturn and a cratered moon-like body, runs down the inner forearm towards the wrist, with a sunburst outline above the wrist. The linework is fine and clean, and dotwork stippling forms a small asteroid cluster beside the larger planets. The tattoo is entirely black ink and grey shading, and the photo shows it against tiled floor and a book with a starry night sky print.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Planet Saturn Moon Sun Star Solar system

Find an artist for this

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, the lot of you, and stop pretending you weren't listening. The band can wait while the drummer finds his other shoe. This is about Ada Pring, who swept this floor in nineteen fifty-one, and the ceiling she was told never to look up at.

Keep reading

The Marlowe Ballroom in Margate had a dome over its floor, painted by a sign-writer called Eli Sorrell who came over on the ferry with nothing but a tin of ink and a grudge. He did the planets in order from the sun, with Saturn tilted in its ring like a bangle left on a shelf. Over the bandstand hung a moon with craters you could count from the balcony. Between the big ones he scattered a cluster of grit he called the asteroids, done in dots so fine you had to squint. Ada used to stand beneath it with her broom and count them in her head while the waltzes went round.

Then the damp came through in February of fifty-two, and the manager had the whole dome whitewashed. Ada watched it go grey and then white, and she didn't say a word. That night she climbed the scaffold with a pot of Indian ink she'd nicked from the office and drew them back in by candle, one by one. Saturn's ring first, then the dots of rock, then a sunburst round the rim so the sun would have something to shine out of. It took her until the Sunday. Nobody noticed for three weeks, and when they did the manager only laughed and said the place looked better for it.

So when the young lad from the Co-op asked her where the moon had gone, she pointed up at the bandstand and said it had never gone anywhere. You only had to dance under a thing long enough before you could see it properly. Then she handed him her broom and told him the floor needed doing.