Two inner wrist tattoos in black ink: on the left a row of planets with a ringed Saturn, on the right a scatter of dots like a constellation.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Planets and constellation dots on wrists

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photo shows two inner wrists side by side, each with a small black tattoo. The left wrist has a horizontal row of solid circles in varying sizes, with one larger circle ringed like Saturn, suggesting a solar system. The right wrist has a loose scatter of small dots, similar to a star map, set against a plain pale background with clean, crisp edges.

Dotwork Fine line Forearm Planet Solar system Saturn Constellation Star 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

You are scraping burnt porridge from the bottom of the pan at three in the morning when Ilse comes down the companionway with the ship's chart folded under one arm. The galley smells of bleach and cold coffee. She sets the chart on the steel worktop between the rice tins and says the Second Mate has been asking for you, and that you should stop pretending you didn't hear the bell.

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You have been at sea eleven weeks on the Marguerite Lind, out of Teesport, bound for Valparaíso with a hold full of cement and a crew of nine who mostly speak to you in orders. Ilse is the only one who asks what you're reading. Tonight she unfolds the chart and shows you the stars she has pricked through the paper with a compass point, and you tell her the Plough is upside down, which it is not. She laughs for the first time since Gibraltar.

When the watch changes and the galley fills with the grey of dawn, she holds out her left hand and asks you to draw on it. You take the biro from behind the ticket rail and make the sun, then Mercury, Venus, a ringed giant at the edge of the page. She answers with a scatter of dots on your own wrist, the stars you never learned the names of, and you let her press the pen down until the ink beads and drags.

The ink fades in a month, the way it does. The chart goes into a tin with your ration cards and the letters you never posted. Years later, the kettle starts its slow climb toward the boil in some other galley, and you find yourself counting dots in the steam, reaching for a name that won't come, while the sea keeps on rolling outside as if it has never once needed feeding.