Black and grey fine line tattoo of the solar system with a sun and dashed orbit lines wrapping around a forearm.

Solar system with sun on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo covers the inner forearm, showing a sun with a face at the centre and planets with dashed orbit lines circling the arm. Some planets are shaded with banded detail, and small dot clusters suggest asteroid belts. The fine, dotted linework and soft grey shading are set against a plain pale skin tone and dark background.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Solar system Sun Planet Orbit Saturn

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Harold kept the dotted lines on the departures board the way other men kept pigeons. Every Sunday he sat in the signal box with a ruler and a tin of Humbrol, redrawing the routes that looped round Carrow Junction like a dropped bootlace, and every Sunday I told him the trains did not care for his geometry.

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He would only laugh and tap the enamel plate beside the ticket window, the one with a sun stamped in the corner, its face squinting out of the rays. Some foundry man in Derby had thought a station ought to smile at its passengers. "Everything goes round something," Harold said. "Even the 4:10 to Leeds, and that one goes round my nerves." He showed me how the rings were spaced, how the little ones were quick and the big ones took their time, and how the cinder dust from the old goods yard had settled in a band between the fourth and fifth orbits, which he insisted on calling the belt.

He retired in March. The following Sunday the 4:10 came in four minutes early, which had never once happened in my years on the platform. I stood there with my flask going cold and found myself counting the dashes on his chart, following them with my finger across the glass. The train slid in and the doors sighed open. Somewhere in the cab a driver I did not know gave a short wave, as though he too had been following a line he could not see.

I still open the box on Sundays. The chart is pinned above the kettle now, a little curled at the edges, and the belt is still gritty with old soot where the ink has pooled. I do not redraw it. I only sit with my tea and watch the minute hand, waiting for the one small planet of a train that will keep faithfully to its orbit.