Fine line black tattoo of the serotonin molecular structure, with HO and NH2 labels, on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Serotonin molecule on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a single black line drawing of a serotonin molecule, showing a bicyclic ring with an HO group, a side chain ending in NH2, and an NH in the ring. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, set against smooth, lightly lit skin. The composition is shot from behind, with the subject's dark hair at the left edge and the tattoo centred in the lower half of the frame.

Fine line Back Molecule Chemical structure Line drawing

Find an artist for this

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

The apothecary at Sarn Pass kept her ledger by the stove and never let the children touch the jars on the top shelf. When the snow closed the road to the valley, carters climbed to her door with coughs and sleeplessness, and she would sit them down and say nothing for a long while. The people of the pass counted that silence as part of the remedy.

Keep reading

One February a boy called Teodor came up from the lower farms with a sack of pale mushrooms and a complaint. The sheep grazing under the north wall, he said, came down from the high meadow looking pleased with themselves, and the mushrooms grew only there. She tipped the sack onto the table, sniffed one, and then took a burnt stick and drew on the slate by the door: a six-sided ring with a second ring fused to its side, a crooked mark at one corner, and a short tail that ran off towards nothing.

"That's what makes them glad," she said. "A ring, a hook that holds water, and a tail that reaches for the next man's door."

Teodor asked why the shape mattered if the sheep already knew it. She said a shape was a road the body walks without being asked, and that the pass had a hundred ways to be sad but she could only sell him one quiet. Then she wiped half the slate with her sleeve, redrew the hook on the other corner, and told him the difference was the whole of her trade.

He carried the slate down in the thaw. Years later the carters said the lines had worn into the stone of the doorstep, and that anyone who stepped over them slept well the first night, though nobody could say which shape it was.