Two views of a forearm tattoo of the solar system, with a yellow sun, coloured planets and dotted orbit lines in a watercolour-style colour work, placed on the inner forearm.

Solar system on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a sun and several planets, including a blue and green Earth-like globe, a brown rocky planet and a disc-shaped planet, each set on dotted elliptical orbit lines that wrap around the forearm. The planets are shaded with soft gradients and surrounded by loose, splashed washes of colour, giving a watercolour-like finish. The photo shows the forearm from two angles against a black background, with the subject's upper body and wrist partly visible.

Forearm Solar system Planet Sun Earth Orbit

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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

At ten past three the ward goes quiet in the way you have learnt to distrust. Bed six's drip alarm chirps, you silence it with your thumb, and the corridor lights hum over a trolley of folded blankets. Your tea has gone cold beside the sluice sink. You are halfway through a set of observations when Mr Dunmore in bay two calls your name in the careful voice of a man who has been awake since midnight and does not want to be a nuisance.

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He is a retired surveyor with a bad hip and a memory for numbers. He wants to know whether the sun is really the heaviest thing in the sky. You tell him what you recall from school, and he corrects you gently. Then he asks for paper. You tear the back off a blood pressure chart and draw him the solar system: a hot orange sun, a pebble of Mercury, a pale Venus, and an Earth you colour in ballpoint and then, when he sighs at the stiffness of it, with a finger dipped in his cold tea. The orbits you draw as dotted lines, because the pen will not hold a curve at this hour. He says they are not circles at all but squashed ovals, like rings a child traces round a dinner plate.

At half four he asks you to show him where you are. You put a dot on the outermost ring, close to the edge of the page, and he taps it with one bony finger and says that's the one that gets the light first. Outside, a van reverses somewhere in the car park, beeping like a slow heartbeat. He falls asleep with the paper folded in his hand. When the day staff come on at seven, the handover sheet lies on the desk with its tea stain spreading into a ring, and the small blue planet is still where you left it, a little smudged, catching the first grey light from the window.