Black and grey fine line solar system tattoo running down a forearm, with a sun featuring a face, planets on dashed orbits and Saturn at the base.

Solar system with sun on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The design shows a sun with a human face and rays at the centre of concentric dashed orbits, with planets, a small comet and a dotted asteroid belt placed along the arm. The linework is fine and precise, with stippled shading on the planets and a scatter of dots for the asteroid belt. The tattoo is entirely black and grey and spans the length of the forearm from the elbow towards the wrist.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Sun Planet Solar system Saturn Orbit Moon Star

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last number 73 bus has already gone when you reach the top of Tanner Hill, so you walk the rest of the way with the city laid out below like a dropped handful of change. Your uncle's old brass telescope is in a holdall on your shoulder, its tripod knocking against your hip with every step. Past the gasworks a fox crosses the road and doesn't bother to look at you.

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The roof of the Corn Exchange is locked, but Dev, the lad on the back door who sells you chips on Thursdays, lets you up the fire escape for a fiver and a promise not to fall off. You set up facing west, where the sodium lamps of the ring road bleed orange into the cloud. Nothing up there looks like a planet. Venus is a smudge and Mars a rusty pin. You turn the focus ring until your eye waters and remember what your uncle said: the sun was never the thing you were meant to watch. It was the thing that kept everything else from drifting off.

At half one a single light slides across the glass, slow and grey, and you hold your breath for a satellite before realising it is only a plane full of tired people heading into Heathrow. You laugh out loud. Dev, smoking by the vent, calls up to ask if you've seen anything. You tell him about the orbits, how every planet keeps its own track around the same bright face, and how nothing out there ever really leaves.

When you pack up at four, the sky has thinned to the colour of weak tea. You fold the tripod, leave the fiver on the vent, and walk down the hill with the telescope on your shoulder, counting the streetlamps the way your uncle counted planets, one and then the next, each keeping its distance from the last.