Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ringed planet and mountains in a profile silhouette

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A head in profile forms the outline of the design, with a night sky of stars and a ringed planet inside it. Below, angular mountain shapes sit above a band of horizontal dashes that suggests water and reflections. The work is rendered in black and grey with solid fills, fine stippling and open highlights, and the design fills the upper arm.

Blackwork Geometric Upper arm Profile Planet Saturn Star Night sky Mountain Water Reflection

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hester Vane had been told the ship's chronometer was right, and she had believed it until the third night out from Harwich, when the stars over the Bay of Biscay refused to sit where the almanac put them. She stood at the taffrail with the second mate's spyglass, counting. Saturn should have been low in the south-west, a pale bead with its ring tilted like a hat brim. Instead it hung higher than the mizzen, and the sea beneath it had gone flat as slate.

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"It's the glass," said Abel Corrie, coming up with two cups of tea gone cold in the wind. "Gives you what you want to see." He did not look at the sky. He looked at the water, where a line of dark ridges rose like hills that had no business being there, their peaks sharp and grey, and under them the swell broke into short dashes of light, row upon row, as though someone had set type on the sea.

Hester had spent six years drawing coastlines for the Admiralty and knew a false horizon when she saw one. She turned the glass on the ridges and found them flat, painted on the night like a backdrop at the Lyceum. She lowered it. The planet was still there, and when she looked with her own eyes it was smaller and plainer, a planet doing what planets do. The mountains, she decided, were the sea's own reflection, thrown up off the swell.

She drew it that night in pencil on the back of a Channel chart: a profile, a brow, a nose, the ring running through the skull like a thought that would not settle. By dawn the dashes had gone and the ridges had sunk back under the water, and Abel left his cold tea on the rail. Sailors leave blanks on their charts, she thought, and some blanks are only the sky looking back.