Black and grey dotwork tattoo of the solar system, with planets including Jupiter and ringed Saturn in a vertical line on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Solar system planets down an arm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical line of planets and dots runs along the inner arm, with a small dot at the top, a row of small planets, a large banded planet resembling Jupiter, and a ringed planet resembling Saturn in the centre. The planets are built from fine stippled dots that create shading and texture, with some surface markings visible. The design is entirely black and grey, and the composition is centred and evenly spaced along the length of the arm against a plain, pale background.

Dotwork Realism Forearm Planet Solar system Saturn Space

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

Dad had the orrery in the back bedroom of our house in Ashby, a brass thing with a crank that never turned true, and on the morning of Aunt Maud's wedding he could not find the Saturn. We tore the spare room apart. Mum said it had gone to the tip with the Christmas tinsel, and Dad said a man did not lose Saturn, he mislaid it.

Keep reading

The wedding was at a registry office in Leicester, with the reception in a function room above a carpet shop. Maud's new husband, Harold, was a retired signalman who knew every railway timetable by heart and nothing whatever about the sky. He had asked for something on the tables that was his, so Dad, ever practical, had spent three nights at the kitchen table with a fine nib and a pot of Indian ink, dotting out the planets one by one on a sheet of card. He stippled each world until it looked as though you could hold it in your palm and feel the bands under your thumb.

Halfway through the speeches Dad stood, cleared his throat and produced the missing Saturn from his breast pocket. It was the card, folded in four, and on it, in a neat row, were the eight worlds and the little dots of the dwarfs, pricked down the middle like a ladder. Harold read it for a long time. Then he said, very quietly, that he had always wondered where the rings went when the lamps were off, and Maud laughed so hard she had to sit down on the parquet.

Dad put the card back in his pocket, but he left the orrery on the sideboard with its crank pointing at the ceiling. Harold wound it that night, Maud told me later, and it ran true for the first time in forty years.