Black and grey fine line tattoo of the solar system with a sun with a face, dotted orbits, planets and a ringed Saturn running down a forearm.

Solar system with sun on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm carries a tattoo of the solar system, with a detailed sun featuring a face at the centre and planets along dotted orbit lines. Linework is fine and precise, with stippled dots forming a belt of asteroids and shading on the planets and sun. The palette is entirely black and grey on pale skin against a dark background, and the composition runs vertically along the arm.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Solar system Sun Planet Saturn Orbit Space Celestial

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shift over, love, and mind the lamp, it's the last of the oil. You want the one about the sun with the face? Everyone on the Tethys ring knows it, though they always tell it wrong.

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Maren Okoro kept the mirror-shop on the fourth ring, where the real sun came through the slats in thin gold bars and nobody slept past the bell. Her grandson Piet wanted off the rock. Every morning before his shift he chalked the orbits on the drafting slate, dotted, not solid, because he said the true paths were only ever remembered, never drawn. When she asked why the sun had a face, he said it was so something would be watching when he went.

He went the spring the belt broke loose and the freight lanes shut. Maren stood on the landing and counted the stippled dots on the slate, the little grey stones that drifted between Mars and the big gas worlds, because the chart said they should hold still and they never did. Eleven hundred and four, she counted, every night, until the number stopped meaning anything and became a kind of prayer.

Three winters later a courier with a limp and grey at his temples stepped off the lock and asked for a cup of tea and somewhere to sit. He had the chart folded in his sleeve, worn soft as cloth. He didn't say where he'd been. He only took the slate from the wall, wiped the old chalk away with his cuff, and drew Saturn at the bottom, ringed and small, the last orbit closing the circle. Then he handed her the chalk, and she counted the dots again, and this time they were all there.