Black and grey fine line tattoo of the planets in a vertical row along a forearm, with Saturn and a banded Jupiter among the smaller spheres.

Planets in a row on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical column of planets runs along the forearm, from small dots at the wrist side to a larger banded planet, a ringed planet and smaller spheres toward the elbow. The linework is fine and the planets are shaded with stippled dots and short strokes to suggest texture and volume. The ink is black and grey on pale skin, set against a softly blurred bedsheet background.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Planet Solar system Saturn Space Celestial

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 big top had lost its middle pole in March, so Mr Ferrante strung the orrery from the ticket wagon instead. Six brass balls on wire, the sun a dented copper pot the size of a cabbage, and me on an upturned crate calling out distances in the voice my mother used for bedtime stories. Nobody came for the planets. They came for the tiger, which had died in Swindon, and stayed for the tea urn.

Keep reading

Saturn was the trouble. Its ring had snapped off in transit and Dougie the rigger had soldered it back with a coat hanger and optimism. Each night before the last house I took the little ring between finger and thumb and checked the solder, the way you would check a child's temperature. Jupiter wobbled. Mars had a chip in its paint like a bitten biscuit. I knew every scratch by heart, and I told the children they were storms, which in a way they were.

In October the wagons started going north without us. Ferrante sold the lions to a farm near Dumfries and kept the calliope for the wedding circuit. On the last night in a field outside Ludlow, the wind got under the tent and the whole rig sighed. I sat with the orrery in my lap and turned the crank slowly, watching the small worlds drift out of line with each other, the way they always do, and nobody had ever told me that was allowed.

I packed the planets in tissue paper, Saturn last, and posted them to the planetarium in Leeds that once wrote back to a girl who had asked about comets. Their reply came a fortnight later: they would be glad to have them. I kept the soldering iron. Some nights, in a caravan that smells of paraffin, I still hear the ring rattle loose on its wire, and I still get up to check it, the way you would check on a sleeping child.