Black and grey fine line tattoo of the sun and a row of planets, including ringed Saturn, running along the inner forearm with small stars and dotted trails.

Solar system sequence on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A row of planets, some ringed, runs from a partial sun with rays at the wrist up the inner forearm. Small stars and dotted trails fill the spaces between the planets. The linework is fine and the larger planets have soft shading, all in black and grey ink on light skin.

Fine line Forearm Sun Planet Saturn Solar system Star Space Moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Kestrel House had been broken since Easter, so Ayo counted the stairs under her breath, the way Nan used to count beads, and at the eleventh landing she gave up and sat on the cold concrete with the shoebox across her knees. Inside were Grandad's drawings, done in biro on the backs of pool rotas and bus timetables. Saturn wore its ring at a tilt, and Jupiter had bands drawn so carefully she could almost feel them under her thumb. Tunde was leaving for Leeds in the morning, and he had not said goodbye yet, only kept tapping the box with his trainer as if it might open itself.

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He went on ahead without asking, and she followed him up the last flights to the roof door, which someone had propped open with a brick. The estate lay below in orange and grey. Beyond the tower blocks the sky was going the colour of a bruise, and the first stars were showing in it like pinpricks in foil. Tunde knelt and laid the drawings out in a row along the tar, the sun at one end, then the planets in order, smallest to furthest, the way Grandad had taught them. Pluto was last, a lonely circle with a question mark he had added years ago as a joke.

"Distance, not who's leaving," Tunde said, reading her face. "That's how he said it works."

A gust came off the car park and lifted Mercury clean off the roof. It skittered towards the edge, and they both lunged, but it tipped over the parapet and was gone, down into the dark where the bins were. Ayo laughed so hard she had to hold the brick. Tunde weighed Venus down with his phone and sat back on his heels, grinning, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all.

When they went down, they took the stairs. Ayo carried the box with the rest of the planets inside it, and she counted every landing aloud, all fourteen of them, so that nobody could say the night had been lost.