Black and grey dotwork and blackwork tattoo of a planet cut into stacked horizontal slices down a forearm, with a desert background.

Sliced planet tattoo on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A planet is drawn in five stacked horizontal slices running down the forearm, like a cross-section through a ringed sphere. The outer edges and rings are rendered in solid black linework, while the surfaces use fine stippled dots and dark patches to suggest shading and texture. The tattoo is the sharp focal point against a soft, out-of-focus cactus landscape, with a rolled-up denim sleeve at the top of the frame.

Dotwork Blackwork Forearm Planet Ring Sphere Globe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mariam had the cedar block clamped before the kettle boiled, and she would not let Eli touch the saw until he had measured the rings twice. "Five slices," she said. "Top to bottom, the way the old Ashby globe was cut. Every layer has to be ground someone once walked on."

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He drew the first line with a carpenter's pencil. The shavings came up pale and sweet, and the brass band for the middle ring, hammered flat on the anvil by the window, sat ready on a square of felt. Outside, the saguaros stood in the heat like patient clerks, and the road into town was empty except for a dust devil turning slowly toward the fence.

By four o'clock they had five discs, each hollowed to show its neighbour beneath, and the continents stippled in with a nib so fine it made Eli's eyes ache. The bottom slice was the darkest, scorched where the lamp had sat too close. Mariam turned it over in her palm and frowned. "Nobody ever wants the bottom one. They say it's the part that doesn't show."

That evening he stacked them on the sill, top to bottom, and held the lamp behind. A thread of light came through the seams where the wood had shrunk a fraction, and for a moment the whole planet glowed at its edges, as if it were still deciding whether to be whole. Eli wrapped the bottom slice in a clean rag and put it in the drawer beneath the tools, where he could feel it every time he reached for the chisel.