Black and grey dotwork and fine line tattoo of a solar system with orbit rings and planets on a limb.

Solar system tattoo with orbiting planets

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a central sun-like circle surrounded by several planets of varying sizes, including one ringed planet at the upper left. Orbit paths are drawn as fine solid and dotted lines that spread across the skin in a wide ellipse. The planets are shaded with stippled dots and light hatching, and the whole piece is in black ink and grey tones.

Dotwork Fine line Other Solar system Planet Orbit Saturn Space

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third orrery in the Halden Works had a cracked brass sun, and I would not let the fitters solder it until the drawing was right. I sat on the gallery rail with the old survey plates across my knees, tracing orbits with a finger that still smelled of graphite from the morning's ledger work. Down on the floor the lathes were quiet for once, and the whole hall smelled of oil and cold metal.

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The solid lines are what the telescopes measured in my grandmother's time, when the ice-hauling crews still sent their logs back by hand. The dotted ones are our guesses, pencilled wide across the plate where the paths would run if the sums held. Harrow, the ringed one, sits far out on the left, and it has been my job for eleven years to make its rings look like they are catching light rather than just sitting there. Every planet on the plate has a name, and most of the names belong to people who never saw them.

Last winter a girl from the ice crews came up to the gallery with a question about the dotted lines. She wanted to know whether a dotted orbit was a promise or a warning. I told her it was neither, only a path we had not yet been brave enough to draw solid. She looked at the plate for a long time before asking whether the lines ever got tired of being held in place by a sun that had cracked.

That night I took the stippling pen to the widest ellipse and pressed one more dot where the outermost path crossed the dark. It was a moon nobody had catalogued, a speck of grey I had invented to see whether anyone would notice. The fitters soldered the sun the next morning. Nobody noticed the dot, and I found I was glad, because it meant the lines were already carrying something I had not told them to carry.