Black blackwork tattoo of planets stacked vertically down the upper back, with Saturn ringed in the middle, beside a small script mark on the shoulder.

Planets in a column down the upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A column of solid black planets and small dots runs down the centre of the upper back, with one larger ringed planet resembling Saturn in the lower middle. Thin dotted orbit lines curve off to the sides, and the bold filled circles contrast with the smooth skin. The photograph is in black and white with soft light, and a partial script mark is visible on the right shoulder.

Blackwork Back Planet Solar system Saturn Orbit Dot Spine Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The note was pinned under the shop door with a tin of Brasso: the Saturn has come loose, fix it before the early bus, and do not touch the dots. You climbed the four flights above the closed barber's with a torch in your teeth and found the orrery in the dark, its brass arms all turned the same way like a crowd that had stopped talking mid-sentence.

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Working by torchlight, you learn the machine. Eight solid discs sit on a rod, each blacked out with enamel gone chalky at the edges. Saturn hangs lower than the rest, and its ring, a thin hoop of wire, has slipped off its pin. Someone has pencilled small dots beside the orbit tracks, not planets, just marks where moons ought to be. You count them twice. Mrs Okafor's late husband built the thing from a kit in 1974, and you suspect the dots were his joke, or his argument with the sky.

At half past four the ring finally seats with a pair of tweezers and a held breath. Outside, the city is dimming its streetlamps for morning. You nudge Saturn along its track until it sits square with the dotted line, and the whole column of planets settles with a sound like a drawer closing.

You leave the torch on the windowsill and pencil one more dot beside the orbit for the next repair. When the first bus swings past below, its headlights sweep across the wall and every planet throws its own small shadow, all of them turning slowly, none of them in a hurry.