Fine line dotwork tattoo of a solar system with a red and orange sun and small coloured planets on a woman's upper back, near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Solar system and orbits on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a sun at the centre, drawn with a dark core and red and orange rays, surrounded by concentric orbit rings. Small planets sit on the rings, with a few in red, blue and orange, and dotted lines trace the paths. The fine dotted and line work is set against bare skin, with the design sitting diagonally across the shoulder blade and the subject's back partly visible above a black bra strap.

Dotwork Geometric Back Solar system Sun Planet Orbit Circle Dot Ring Celestial

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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

Aunt Vi never let anyone mow the grass inside the big circle. Every March she walked the rings with a pocket of pebbles, pressing each one into the lawn where the dotted line ran, and every March I told her the pattern was nonsense because the lawn had no need of orbits. She ignored me. The sun was a rusted cartwheel she had painted with red and orange rays, sunk in the middle of the plot, and the planets were bottle caps nailed to hazel stakes, Mercury nearest the path and Neptune out by the compost bin where the hedge gave up.

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When she died in February the solicitor gave me the key to the shed and a list of instructions in her sloping hand. Water the sun on Tuesdays. Do not move Mars. Mind the blue one, it sticks. I did as she wrote, mostly, though I could not work out why she had ringed the whole thing with cracked mugs, each one filled with rainwater and a single sprig of thyme.

It was the mugs that gave me the last thing. On the back of the list, under the thyme, she had drawn the plot from above, every orbit a fine dotted circle, and beside the outermost she had written in pencil: the slow ones, let them go round.

So in April I left the far stakes alone. Neptune is a bottle cap gone green, the grass has grown up through its ring, and the thyme has seeded itself along the whole circuit, so from the back bedroom window the garden looks like a small, unhurried system with nothing in a hurry to get anywhere.