Fine line tattoo of a solar system with elliptical orbits and small coloured planets around a dark sun, on the inside of a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Solar system on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The design shows a dark central sun surrounded by several concentric elliptical orbit lines, with small planets in red, green, blue, yellow and purple placed on the rings. The orbits are drawn in thin black linework, and the planets are small solid colour dots. The forearm is photographed against a pink painted brick wall, with the tattoo near the centre of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Solar system Planet Orbit Sun

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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 orrery came off the belt at ten past four, wrapped in a school jumper and taped at the corners, and the man beside it kept saying it was only a clock. I had him open the case on the steel table under the strip light. Inside, a brass sun no bigger than a grapefruit sat in a nest of tissue paper, with wire rings bent into ovals around it, and on each ring a small painted bead: red, green, blue, yellow, and a violet one riding the widest track.

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Regulations say I log anything that ticks. My colleague Dev wanted it tagged for a second look. I asked the man how it worked, and he turned the crank with one finger, slowly, the way you would wake a sleeping child. The beads moved along their wires without ever touching. He said his father had built it from a kit in a flat above a dry cleaner's in Bolton, and had never once been further than Calais, and had wanted to know which bead was which before the cancer took him.

I stamped the form cleared. Dev asked me why, and I said the planets were all going the same way round, which seemed the only honest thing to say about a machine like that. Nothing in it was hiding anything.

Afterwards I stood at the window while the lorries pulled out onto the motorway, and I found myself searching the grey for the real thing, which was not there. I thought of the little violet bead going round its track in the dark, at the same patient pace all night, whichever side of the line you happened to be standing on.