Black and grey dotwork tattoo on a forearm showing a ringed planet cut into horizontal slices, with a blurred cactus background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sliced planet layers on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a ringed planet sliced into five horizontal sections, each drawn as a cross-section with continent-like shapes on the surfaces. The planet's sphere is shaded with stippled dots, while the rings and cut edges use bold solid black fills and fine outlines. The design runs vertically down the forearm against a soft, blurred desert background.

Dotwork Blackwork Forearm Planet Globe Sphere Ring Continent

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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

Maud, the big globe came apart again on the A66 outside Penrith, so I have spent the afternoon in a lay-by with a tin of Brasso and a sheet of mill board. You'll laugh, but the thing is still standing. Mr Pollard wants it for the finale, the one where the ringed planet splits open and the trapeze girls drop through the gap. He says the audience needs to see the inside of the world, which I suppose is what we've all been doing since the tent got smaller.

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I cut it myself in the winter, with the big top flapping over the caravans and the generator coughing like an old dog. Five slices, each a clean sawn disc, the ring bolted round the middle like a belt on a man who has lost weight. I stippled the sphere by hand, dot after dot, because Pollard said the paint looked like cake icing under the lights. The continents I copied from my father's atlas, the coast of Africa on the top slice, the Americas stacked beneath like pages a child has shuffled.

Tonight the rigger says the bolts will hold for one more season. Hold them yourself, if you can, and tell me whether the top half should stay open. I keep thinking a crowd would sooner see the world whole than sliced, but nobody has paid to watch a whole world since the Coronation.

Yours in sawdust, Ed