Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a heart containing planets, stars and a crescent moon on the inner upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Planets and crescent moon in a heart on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A heart outline is filled with a striped planet resembling Jupiter, a ringed planet resembling Saturn, a crescent moon, four-pointed stars and small dots, with another partly visible planet at the lower left edge. The motifs are built from stippled dotwork shading, with fine hatched lines defining the striped planet and the rings. The design is entirely black ink in greys against pale skin, set against a soft grey background.

Dotwork Upper arm Heart Planet Saturn Moon Crescent moon Star Space Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass refractor on the roof of Carver's Yard had not been turned since the winter the council sold the building, and Ruth Adeyemi could not stop thinking about it. She climbed the iron ladder at midnight with a torch in her teeth and a tin of machine oil in her coat pocket. Below her the city hummed, buses sighing along Kirkgate, a dog barking at nothing behind the chapel.

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Her grandfather had left her three things: the telescope, a stack of star charts he had drawn by hand, and a rule that she was never to look at Jupiter without writing down what she saw. She wrote it down now, in pencil, on the back of a bus ticket. Striped, she wrote. A pale band across the middle like a thumbprint in cream. Then Saturn, low and sulking over the gasworks, its rings tipped like a hat somebody had knocked sideways.

The moon was a thin crescent, the kind you might mistake for a fingernail clipping. Ruth stood a long time with her eye at the eyepiece. Somewhere a hundred thousand little lights were burning, and she counted the ones she could see by pricking them onto the paper, one dot at a time, the way her grandfather had taught her, until the pencil wore through to the card.

At dawn the shop downstairs would open and the bell would ring for the first customer, a man wanting his watch fixed. Ruth folded the bus ticket into quarters and tucked it behind the lens cap. She would come back up tomorrow night. The sky had not finished showing her what it kept hidden, and she had been patient with worse.