Black and grey dotwork tattoo on a calf showing a column of planets with Saturn, dotted orbit arcs, and a surreal face with roots below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Planets and orbits with a surreal face on a calf

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical column of planets and a sun runs up the calf, with a ringed planet resembling Saturn, joined by dotted orbit arcs. Below, a stippled face with a sunburst crown and an eye in its temple sits above a root-like form that reaches down to the ankle. The work is in black ink and greys, using dense dot shading for the planets and face and fine dotted lines for the orbits.

Dotwork Geometric Calf Planet Saturn Sun Orbit Face Root Space

Find an artist for this

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 rain had been coming down on the Thursday market since before the bells, and Hester Vane was still selling small planets from under her striped awning when the stranger came up the lane with his collar turned against it. She kept them in a cracked bowl on a bed of wet straw: tin moons, a green marble for the sea, and a brass sun no bigger than a plum. Customers bought them for windowsills and for children who would not sleep.

Keep reading

He asked for the sun. She wrapped it in yesterday's newspaper and asked him what he wanted it for. He said he wanted to see whether it would stay where he put it. She said the ringed one was the hard one to keep, because it had to carry its own rings along, and that was why the old women in the lane called Saturn the cart horse. The sun, she said, was only a face that had stopped blinking.

He paid with three coins still warm from his pocket and a root he had dug from beneath the cathedral wall. It was pale and forked and still smelled of the clay. Hester set it in the bowl among the planets and the rain ran off it into the straw. Nobody in the market could say afterwards whether she had told him that each ring was a road the planets had worn with walking, or whether he had only dreamed it while the water dripped from his hat.

When the rain stopped near dusk, the awning was dry and the bowl was empty except for the root. In the morning the mud of the lane was scored with fine circles, one inside another, running from the foot of Hester's stall out past the bakery and the chemist's, and every one of them had been walked smooth.