Black and grey dotwork tattoo of stacked planets, including two ringed planets, within a thin rectangular frame marked 0, 1/2 and 1, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Planets in a vertical scale on forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a column of planets stacked vertically, with ringed planets near the top and banded and cratered bodies below, all linked by a central line. A thin rectangular frame with the markings 0, 1/2 and 1 surrounds the column, and a stippled base sits at the bottom. The planets are shaded with fine dots in black and grey ink, and the composition is symmetrical and evenly spaced along the forearm.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Planet Solar system Saturn Scale Frame Dot

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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

Mind the third step, it's worn to a dip. There, that's it. Sit by the stove and I'll tell you about the brass rule my grandfather kept on the lamp-room wall, the one with the planets pinned along it like beads on a string.

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He was keeper at Scarrow Head the winter the light went dark for eleven nights. The oil was sound and the wick was sound, and still the beam threw nothing past the rocks. So he took down the long thin rule, marked 0 at the top and 1 at the bottom with a little 1/2 squeezed in the middle, and told my gran the trouble wasn't in the lamp at all. Nobody on that coast knew how far away anything was any more, not the boats, not the sea, not even the stars.

He climbed to the gallery with a ledger and a pot of ink and drew the worlds on that rule, each one the size it ought to be against the others. Saturn with its ring, great banded Jupiter, the cratered little moons, and at the bottom a scatter of dots like spray on a sill, because that was the only way he could make the sea look as far off as it truly was. Gran said he worked three nights without sleeping, and on the fourth the fog lifted and a skipper's lantern answered ours from the sound.

Gran kept that rule until she died. It hangs in the porch now. When the wind comes round to the north it knocks against its nail, and I still touch the dots at the bottom before I climb up to light the lamp.