Black and grey tattoo of the solar system on a forearm, with a smiling sun at the wrist, ringed Saturn and other planets along dashed orbit lines.

Solar system with smiling sun on forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A line-and-shade tattoo runs up the inner forearm, with a smiling sun with radiating rays at the wrist and a sequence of planets above it. Dashed orbit lines curve across the skin, and a scatter of small asteroids sits between the planets, with a ringed Saturn and a banded gas giant near the top. The work is in black ink and grey shading on pale skin, with the planets drawn in a consistent, slightly hand-engraved style.

Forearm Solar system Sun Planet Saturn Orbit Space

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

After two in the morning, Dennis would never let anyone raise the main lights past dim. He said the sun was off duty and the ward had to make do with the little lamps. My first winter on nights I took it for one of the jokes porters play on new girls, until he drew me a map on the back of a fluid chart to prove it.

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The map was the solar system, done in biro. Dashed lines looped round the paper like the routes of the tea trolley, which he called the truest orbit on the ground floor. Saturn wore its rings at the top. Between the big planets he had scattered a handful of asteroids, which were the crumbs nobody ever swept from the sandwich trolley. At the bottom, where the paper folded, he drew a sun with rays and a grin, and told me that was where the shift started and where it ended, because everything else went round it.

Last spring they moved Dennis to days, and then to a bungalow in Shoreham with a greenhouse he kept sending me photographs of. I found the chart folded inside my locker, with a new planet added in the margin and a note in his spidery capitals: MIND BED NINE, HE LIKES THE LIGHT ON. So I walked the ward in the dim, read every name off the boards, and let each dashed route bring me back to the desk.

At six the blinds went up, and the real sun came through the window and lay across the floor like a dropped map. Bed Nine was awake and squinting, asking me if Saturn's rings were really there or just something people drew. I told him they were there, if you knew where to look, and that I would show him on the back of his breakfast menu.