Black and grey dotwork tattoo of the sun and a row of planets, including Saturn, linked by fine dotted geometric lines down a forearm.

Solar system dotwork on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A sun with radiating rays sits at the top of the design, followed by a descending column of planets, one of them ringed like Saturn. Fine dotted lines form geometric shapes that link the bodies, and the planets are built from stippled dots with some shading. The tattoo runs the length of the forearm in black and grey, with a plain blurred background.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Sun Planet Solar system Saturn Dotted line Geometric shape

Find an artist for this

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

Hettie Marsh kept the narrowboat Heron on the Ouse, moored below the mill at Naburn. Each winter she sat by the stove with a sail needle and a tin of lamp black, pricking the night sky into the brass plate above the hearth one dot at a time. Her father had told her the sun was a hot coin the river carried up and down each day. She never believed him, and she never told him so.

Keep reading

The lock-keeper's boy, Tobias Wem, came aboard one February with a wet cap and a question about why the sun had spikes like a hedgehog. Hettie drew him the rays, then showed him how the planets walked out from the sun in a line, smallest first, the way ducklings follow a hen. She joined them with dotted threads. "A line you can see is only a line," she said. "The ones you have to imagine are what hold it together." He asked which planet had the ring. She said it was the one that wore its gloves on the outside.

The flood came in March. The river went over the towpath in a single night, Heron tore her mooring post clean out of the bank, and Hettie would not leave the stove. Tobias came up the water in a borrowed skiff with a rope round his chest and found her sitting with the brass plate across her knees and one lamp lit beside her. She was tracing the threads with a fingertip, planet to planet, and her finger had stopped at the ringed one.

He sat down beside her and took the needle from her apron pocket. Past the last planet, where the dotted threads ran out, he pricked one more point, small and bright, and told her it was where the river went when it had finished with us. Hettie laughed until the lamp guttered. By morning the water had turned, and the plate had one more star on it than it had the night before.