Coloured drawing of the sun-facing planets in a row on white paper, with Saturn's rings and small black dots for stars, shown as a tattoo design on a red background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Solar system planets design

Colour · Flash

A coloured drawing of the planets of the solar system arranged in a horizontal row, from small rocky planets on the left to Saturn with its rings and a large banded Jupiter, then smaller blue and teal planets on the right. The planets are shaded with soft gradients and surrounded by scattered black dots representing stars. The design sits on white paper against a dark red background.

Planet Solar system Saturn Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are eight the summer your grandfather presses a chart into your hands, folded soft as a tea towel, with the planets drawn across it like moored boats. He taps the smallest one with his pipe stem and says that is where the cold rock starts, and you are to count outwards until your finger aches. Mercury, Venus, the red one he calls the Fighter, then the great striped giant he swears could swallow the lot and still be hungry.

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Down on the Saltcombe quay the fishing boats knock together on their ropes and the gulls quarrel over gutted mackerel. Abel's eyes are going, so after the pubs shut you sit on the back step and read him the sky. Saturn is easy, you tell him, because its ring catches the lamplight like a wet hoop of rope. The dots scattered between the planets are not planets at all. They are stars that stay put while the wanderers slide between them, and that, he says, is how a man finds his way home in fog.

In August the harbourmaster asks for someone to explain the sky to the new lads from the inland farms, who can't tell a planet from a plane. Abel insists it be you. You chalk the row onto the slate by the lifeboat house, and you make Jupiter far too small, and the lads laugh until you make it right, and then Abel laughs loudest of all.

The next morning the tide comes in over the slipway and takes the chalk first from the little rocky ones, then from the cold blue pair at the end, and last of all from the great striped giant. When the water drains away again, the dots are still there, scattered across the wet stone exactly where you put them, and you start counting them from the wall, one by one, the way he taught you.