Black and grey fine line tattoo of planets in a vertical row on the inner forearm, with the ringed Saturn near the centre.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Solar system planets down a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical column of planets and small dots runs along the inner forearm, decreasing in size from the wrist to the elbow. The spheres are shaded with fine stippled and hatched linework, and one planet has a ringed outline. The tattoo is black and grey against pale skin, set against a plain bedsheet background.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Planet Solar system Saturn Dot

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

Eleven minutes before the relay at Tessaly goes dark, and Ama has the orrery upside down again. You take it from her gently and turn it the right way, the brass arms clicking into their grooves. Outside the viewport the real ones hang where they always hang, pale and indifferent, and you tell her to stop looking at the big one and start counting from the small end.

Keep reading

Mercury first. Then Venus, then the blue one your father was born under, then the little moon-carrying one with its dust cap. Each has a width, and each width is a number the navigators have agreed on for two hundred years, so the ship's bones can be measured against them. Jupiter comes next, fat and striped, and the ringed one after it is the one you always save for last, because the rings are where the lane bends.

The relay chimes its warning. You do not look at the console. You look at the ringed world on the brass arm and let your finger drop from its ring to the dot at the end, where the old charts put the drop-off. Ama's breath fogs the glass. The engines shudder, then settle, and the ship slides out of the lane at the exact angle the planets promised.

She laughs, the way children laugh when they have been frightened and then not. 'So they were a map,' she says. You tell her they were always a map. The sky only needed someone patient enough to read it in order, from the smallest to the last.