Black and grey dotwork and fine line tattoo of the solar system, with planets sitting on elliptical orbit rings across a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Solar system with orbiting planets

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of the solar system shows a central sun-like sphere surrounded by several planets of varying sizes, each placed on concentric elliptical orbit rings. The linework is fine and precise, with the orbits drawn as thin lines and dotted paths, and the planets shaded with stippling and soft grey tones. The design is centred in the frame against smooth skin, with a partial darker tattoo visible at the right edge.

Dotwork Fine line Other Solar system Planet Orbit Space Sun

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third step, it gives under you, and do not lean on the wall while I am talking, for the wall has heard everything and keeps none of it. Sit where the peat smoke can reach you. Now. This is about Iain Gillies, who kept the light at Sgeir Dubh when there were only four houses and a boat to bring the post, and about the summer he tried to put the sky on the schoolroom floor.

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He had a box of pebbles from the Sound and a candle stub his mother had saved from the chapel. Every evening after the lamp was lit he set the candle in the middle of the boards and laid a stone round it at the distance he had worked out from a book the minister lent him. Mercury he gave the smallest pebble, a grey one with a white thread through it. The big blue one, the wanderer, he took from his own pocket and would let no other child touch. He chalked rings around the candle, and down the rings he drew dots, because the book said the far ones moved so slowly they could hardly be seen to go at all.

On the last night of August the wind came up off the Atlantic and the schoolroom door blew open. In the morning the chalk was gone from the boards, the stones lay scattered in the four corners, and the candle had burned down to nothing. Iain did not cry. He went down to the strand with a nail and drew the whole sky again in the wet sand, ring after ring, and when the tide came in it took the rings but left the dots, because the sea cannot wash out a thing made by stopping and starting.

So that is why the dotted paths are the slowest, and why the planets sit where they sit. Each one was told where to go by a boy with a nail and a candle. Go on home now. The lamp on Sgeir Dubh is lit again, and his great-nephew lights it. If you stand at the end of the pier when the beam turns, you can still see Iain out on the strand, drawing one dot at a time.