Black and white photo of a person's bare back with a fine line column of planetary and astrological symbols running down the spine.

Planetary symbols down the spine

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A column of planetary and astrological symbols runs vertically down the centre of the back, from the base of the neck to the lower back. The symbols include a sun, Mercury, Venus, an Earth symbol with a small crescent moon beside it, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, drawn in thin black linework with even weight. The photograph is greyscale, with the person's short dark hair at the top of the frame and an even, neutral background.

Fine line Back Planet Sun Moon Saturn Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every morning before the first train, I chalk the planets onto the board at the end of platform two, sun at the top, Mercury beneath it, down to the little one at the bottom that nobody asks about any more. My father did it before me, with the same yellow chalk tin, and his rule was that the column must run straight down like the spine of a book, with no handwriting allowed to wander.

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When the letter came from London saying Pluto had been taken off the list of planets, Harold Venn, the stationmaster, said we should wipe it and be done. I told him the board had never been a list of what the astronomers approved of. It was a record of what Carrow Junction had been keeping track of since 1952, and Pluto had hung at the bottom of it through every timetable change and two floods. I kept it. Harold let it go with a sniff and a remark about the price of chalk.

Last Tuesday a boy in a school blazer, waiting for the 6.40, read the column aloud with his finger, stopping at each symbol. At the bottom he frowned and asked whether Pluto was still a planet. I said it was still out there going round the sun, only slower and smaller than anyone had bothered to count. He thought about that and said it sounded like most of the people on this platform. I laughed, and then the 6.40 came in under the board, and I stood with the chalk in my hand, leaving the last symbol up.