Black and grey blackwork tattoo on the upper arm showing a ringed planet, stars, mountain peaks and horizontal lines of water beneath a dark night sky.

Ringed planet and mountains on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the upper arm and shows a ringed planet with a dark band across it, a glowing ring system and small star points against a solid black sky. Below the horizon, a row of sharp mountain peaks sits above fine horizontal lines that suggest water, with the lines fading out towards the lower edge. The composition is entirely black and grey, using solid black fill for the sky and sea and soft grey shading on the planet and peaks.

Blackwork Upper arm Saturn Planet Ring Star Mountain Sea Night sky Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass telescope had been on the trestle since six, and by eleven the rain had found the gap in the awning above it and was running off the lens in a thin, steady line. Nobody wanted to look at the sky on a Tuesday in March. I had a box of old encyclopaedias under the table, their spines gone soft, and a loose plate of Saturn tucked inside the 1953 volume where the damp hadn't reached.

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The man who stopped at the stall wore a coat two sizes too big and kept his hands in its pockets. He didn't ask about the telescope. He picked up the plate, turned it to the light from the bulb over my head, and said his late wife had once described the planet to him as a coin balanced on a black table. He wanted to know if the ring was real or only drawn, and I told him the ring was real enough, made of ice and stone, though nobody had ever stood under it.

He paid two pounds in coins that had been wet for an hour. I wrapped the plate in a carrier bag and watched him walk off past the fishmonger's shutters and the crates of lemons until the crowd swallowed him.

When I packed up at half four the pavement was a black mirror, and the rain had drawn fine silver lines across the tarmac, all running towards the grate and thinning as they went. I stood a while with the damp cardboard box against my hip. Above the car park the cloud was too thick for stars. I thought of the coin on the table and the man in the big coat, and I found I was counting the lines.