Black and grey tattoo of a ringed planet, moons and four-point stars above mountains, framed in a hexagon on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ringed planet and mountains in a hexagon on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A ringed planet, a smaller moon and several four-point stars sit in a dark night sky above a range of mountains and a flat foreground. The solid black sky and bold outlines contrast with softer grey shading on the planet and the hills. The motif is contained within a hexagonal frame that is filled in black at the edges.

Traditional Blackwork Forearm Planet Saturn Ring Moon Star Mountain Landscape Space Hexagon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had been told the ring was a fault in the lens. Every night for a month he wiped the brass eyepiece with the same grey cloth, and every night the pale band still lay across the planet like a blade laid on a table. Brother Osric, who kept the infirmary and had no opinion on astronomy, said it was the sort of thing that happened when a man stared at the sky too long with a cold in his head.

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The monastery sat high above the last village, where the road gave up and the mountains began their long grey shoulder. From the observatory roof the peaks went down in steps, black and then silver, and beyond them the flat country of the valley lay under cloud. Anselm had come up with a box of star charts, a letter from a cousin in the city, and a habit of counting. He counted the four-pointed stars, seven that winter, and wrote them in the margin of the abbot's almanac in a small careful hand.

On the last night of the year the ring tilted into full view, and the moon hung off to the left like a coin someone had dropped and forgotten. Anselm carried the lamp up the ladder and called Osric out in his nightshirt. For a while neither of them spoke. The mountains held the light along their ridges, and the planet rose slowly over them as though it had been waiting for someone to notice.

"Well," Osric said at last, pulling his hood closer. "It has not gone anywhere."

Anselm wrote the date beneath the stars, and under it, for the first time, he wrote nothing about lenses.