Small black fine line tattoo of planets in a row, one ringed like Saturn, on the upper back just below the neckline of a person with hair tied up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Row of planets on the upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small row of black planets runs horizontally across the upper back, decreasing in size from right to left, with one larger ringed planet near the centre. The planets are rendered as solid black circles with some fine stippled texture, and the ring is a single thin line. The ink is black on pale skin, and the photo is framed from behind with a white top and dark hair at the edges.

Fine line Back Planet Saturn Solar system Ring Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You'll all remember Mr Pargeter's orrery, the one that lived in the cupboard under the stairs at Ashdown Primary, because nobody was allowed to touch it but him. Brass balls on wire spokes, turned by a handle that squeaked like a gull. I stood on a chair the day the ring came off Saturn, and the whole class held its breath as if the solar system might go clattering down the stairwell.

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It was Dilys Hobbs who found the ring on the floor by the radiator, bent into a question mark. Pargeter didn't shout. He sat down on the bottom step with his tea going cold and said a planet with a ring was a planet that had been dropped at least once in its life. Then he sent Dilys to the caretaker's shed for a length of wire, and we spent the whole of dinner break threading that ring back on, one of us holding the spoke steady while another twisted, none of us sure we were doing it right.

He taught us the order that afternoon, and I've never forgotten it: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, then the big ones out past the belt, each one further off and slower to come round. The little ones nearest the sun go fastest, he said, the way the quick children always end up at the front. Dilys had her hand up before he'd finished the sentence, asking whether Saturn ever got tired of holding its ring up. Pargeter laughed and said no, that was the trick of it, you only had to hold on.

So when you see her by the urn tonight, ask her to show you the wire. She's carried it in her purse for fifty years, and it's still bent in exactly the shape of a question.