Two foot tattoos in black ink: a row of planets, one ringed, running up the left foot, and a vertical row of moon phases up the right foot.

Planets and moon phases on both feet

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of two bare feet resting together. The left foot carries a vertical line of small dotted circles, a ringed planet and a larger shaded sphere at the bottom, while the right foot has a column of circles that move from solid dark to outlined, like moon phases. The linework is simple and sketchy with light shading in black ink, and the background is a textured grey fabric.

Other Planet Solar system Moon phase Moon Saturn Circle Feet

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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

Gather in close to the brazier, for the cold gets into the bones after midnight on Fargate. I'll tell you about the Pryce sisters, who kept the lamp at the top of Rutland Street stairs when the gasworks still roared.

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Ada was the elder and she kept the planets. She had a brass orrery on her front room sideboard and could tell you which of the wandering stars was up before the last tram rang its bell. Her sister Win kept the moon, which in those days meant a notebook of pale pencilled circles, one for every night, going from full to nothing and back again. Between them they knew the whole sky, and neither would admit the other knew anything.

The quarrel came the winter the gasworks shut. Ada said Win's moon was only a lantern hung in the wrong place. Win said Ada had never once looked up without a clock in her hand. Neither spoke for nine days, until on the tenth Win came home to find Ada asleep by the stove with her boots off and a pen cap clutched in her fist. Down the sole of one foot, in careful spidery ink, Ada had drawn Saturn with its ring, a dark sphere for Jupiter, and a line of small dots climbing towards the ankle. So Win sat on the cold floor beside her and, with a steady hand, drew the moon's phases down the other foot, dark to full, so the two columns stood side by side like sentries.

When Ada woke she laughed until she coughed, and that night they walked the length of the canal with the lamps going out one by one behind them. At the lock Ada asked which phase they were in now. Win looked up, found only a thin paring of light, and said it was simply on its way somewhere. Ada said that was what she had been saying all along.