Two hands with spread fingers showing small fine line black tattoos of astrological symbols on the fingers, including a sun, a crescent moon and a triangle.

Planetary symbols on fingers

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two pale hands are photographed palms inward against a dark background, with the fingers spread and curled. Small black fine line astrological symbols sit on the finger joints, including a circle with a dot, a crescent moon, a triangle and several planetary glyphs. The ink is crisp and monochrome, and the even lighting and centred composition keep the small symbols clearly readable.

Fine line Hand Sun Moon Triangle Finger Hand Glyph

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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 almanac office at Cold Harbour shuttered its windows at dusk, but the sky did not wait for us, so each winter Mr Aldous Pell taught the copyists to carry the heavens on their hands. He had learned it from a Lundy pilot who lost his charts in a gale. The sun sat at the first knuckle, the moon beside it, and the little crooked Mars, which never stood where the tables put him, got the joint nearest the nail, where a thumb would worry it.

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I was nineteen that January and proud of my copperplate, so I scorned the trick until the fog came down thick as wool and the lamp on my desk began to smoke. The tide tables for the Margate packet were half done, and I had only a stub of candle and a bottle of ink gone to sludge. I pressed my fingers flat against the cold brass rail and counted the joints the way Pell had made me chant them, sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, until the figures came up out of my hand like water from a pump.

When the lamp finally guttered out I was still at it, reckoning by touch alone, and I got every hour right. Pell found me at first light, grey-faced, holding my pen above a page I could not see. He looked at my hand for a long moment, then at the tables, and said only, "Mars has been wrong for a hundred years. Your fingers have not."