Black and grey fine line tattoo of the solar system across a person's upper back, with concentric orbit rings, shaded planets and a ringed Saturn.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Solar system across the upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a solar system with several concentric elliptical orbit lines, a central shaded planet, and smaller planets placed along the rings. One planet has a ringed outline, and dotted lines and small dots suggest further orbits and distant bodies. The linework is fine and even, with stippled and shaded tones on the planets, set against the centre of the upper back on a dark background.

Fine line Dotwork Back Solar system Planet Saturn Orbit Space

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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

The lift in Harrowby House has been dead since Tuesday, so you take the stairs with the star atlas under your arm, counting landings the way your dad used to count orbits, out loud and badly. Fourteen, fifteen. The stairwell smells of bleach and somebody's Sunday dinner, and the air gets colder every floor. By the nineteenth the library book has gone soft at the corners from the damp, and you hold it against your jumper like it might escape.

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Mrs Okonedo lets you use her kitchen table because yours is buried under Year Nine coursework. You open the atlas to the page with the orbits, those fine ellipses nested like the rings of a cut tree, and you copy them with a compass you borrowed from the school and never gave back. Saturn gets its ring drawn three times because the first two wobble. Mars you shade with a pencil stub, pressing until the graphite shines. The comets you mark with dots, one at a time, slow, the way your dad taught you on the back of a bus ticket.

She tells you the tower was designed to be seen from the motorway, so the people inside would feel looked after from a distance. You say the planets don't look after anybody. They just keep going round. She laughs and pours you tea into a mug that says Skegness, and for a while neither of you says anything at all.

Walking down in the dark, you check the drawing against the atlas and find the outermost dotted line runs past the edge of the page where the paper has torn. You kept going anyway, past the margin, out where nothing is printed, and you trust it to be there the way you trust the lift will come back on, the way you trust the stairs will still be there when you reach the bottom.