Dotwork solar system tattoo wrapping a lower leg, with a sun with a red-orange centre near the knee and shaded planets, including Saturn, on orbit lines.

Solar system with sun on a lower leg

Dotwork · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A sun with radiating rays sits just below the knee, with a red-orange core and fine black lines. Shaded planets, including one with rings resembling Saturn, sit on thin curved orbit lines that run down the shin. The planets use stippled dotwork shading in greys, while the sun adds a touch of warm colour, and the design fills the leg from top to bottom against a plain pale background.

Dotwork Geometric Calf Sun Planet Saturn Orbit Solar system

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hollis kept the orrery on the wheelhouse shelf for thirty years, though nobody aboard had ever seen him wind it. The brass arms had gone green at the joints. When the trawler Ada Marr came off the Dogger in November with her net torn and her fuel low, the skipper's son found him at the chart table, copying figures from the almanac into a school exercise book.

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"Sun's up at ten past seven," Hollis said, not looking round. "That means nothing to you, but it'll mean something to the Ada by Thursday." Arthur wanted to argue. The wireless had given them the weather as a grey shrug, and the fleet was scattering toward the Humber in the dark. Hollis tapped his pencil on a page where he had drawn the planets as rings, each one a little further out, the sun a dot with rays spilling from it.

He explained it the way his own father had explained it to him. The planets go round at their own pace, so a man who knows where each one sits can tell the hour without a watch and the season without a calendar. Saturn, with its rings, sat furthest out on the page, slow as a cow asleep in a field. Arthur said it was daft. Hollis said the sea did not care what was daft, and the sum took him nine minutes on paper, which was about the length of a good cup of tea.

Thursday morning the Ada came in on the top of the tide with her crew cold and whole. Arthur found the exercise book in the wheelhouse drawer, its pages curled with damp, and under the last sum Hollis had written in careful pencil: Saturn is always last to set. Keep to that and you'll get home. Arthur folded the book shut and put it in his oilskin pocket, where it stayed until the ink ran.