Two photographs of matching black and grey tattoos on a pair of calves, each showing a sextant, orbit lines and a sun face in an engraved sketch style.

Sextant and sun tattoo on both calves

Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The two photographs show a mirrored pair of tattoos on the calves, each featuring an antique sextant over a circular dial with dashed orbit lines and planet-like dots. A sun with a face sits at the base of the left leg, and a small globe or lamp motif sits at the base of the right leg. The shading uses fine cross-hatched linework on a pale skin background, with no colour ink.

Calf Sun Planet Orbit Globe Dial

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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

You keep the sextant in the top drawer beneath the stamp pad, because the scanner at the Halvard crossing has been dead since the thaw, and the regulations say a post must still be able to fix its own position when the machines lie down. Nobody trained you to use it. You learned from a dead officer's notebook, its margins full of pencilled arcs and small careful sums, and from the dashed orbit lines he ruled around every reading as though the planets were following his figures.

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The woman arrives on foot just after dusk, with papers that the screen would have rejected and a face that the lamp cannot quite settle on. The lorry drivers have gone to sleep in their cabs. You lift the brass instrument onto the counter, set the index arm, and sight the sun where it sits red and low over the marsh. The mirror doubles it, one bright disc slid against its reflection, until the two touch on the horizon. You write the minutes down, then the degrees, then check them against the tide table twice because your hands are not steady.

The figures put her a hair's breadth on your side of the river. You could argue with that. You could also let the sum be wrong. Instead you stamp her papers with the date and the reading, and enter the altitude in the log in ink, where anyone can check it. She asks why you trust a piece of brass over a machine. You tell her the sun does not need a password and has never once been wrong about the hour. When she has gone you close the drawer, and the sun on the dial of the instrument goes on sitting exactly where you left it, with the planets strung out in their dashed circles, waiting for the morning.