Back tattoo of stacked planets and fine geometric lines running down the spine, mostly black and grey with one blue planet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stacked planets down the spine

Geometric · Back · Mixed · Photo

A column of planets and celestial bodies runs vertically down the centre of the back, enclosed by fine geometric linework and triangles. Most planets are rendered in black and grey shading and stippled dots, with one smaller planet in blue and a faint reddish wash around the upper section. The composition is symmetrical and centred on the spine, with the design fading out at the bottom of the frame.

Geometric Dotwork Back Planet Saturn Moon Triangle Spine Celestial

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The almanac was swollen with damp by the time we cleared the Azores, and Mr Pryce had pencilled his star sights into its margins so small that I needed the binnacle lamp to read them. He made me hold the sextant while he took the altitudes, because my hands were steady and my legs, he said, were no use to anybody on a pitching deck.

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That week the sky gave us nothing but Saturn, low and yellow over the mizzen, and a bright blue-white point that Pryce called Venus and the cook called the evening star. The rest of the heavens had gone behind a grey lid. He taught me to work from the top of the list down, each body giving one line on the chart, and where the lines crossed was where the ship was. Get one wrong and the whole column lied to you, he said, tapping the almanac with his pipe stem, so mind your seconds.

On the ninth night the fog thinned for the length of a single breath. Pryce sighted Saturn, then the small moon, then the evening star, and I wrote the readings in the log while the lantern swung and the sea hissed along the hull. The lines crossed in a tight little knot, no bigger than a thumbprint on the paper.

"That's us, lad," he said, and he marked the knot with a neat X and went below for his tea. Bessie was cutting bread in the galley when I came down with the book under my arm, and she looked at the chart over my shoulder and laughed, because I had drawn the X so carefully I'd forgotten to check which way the ship was pointing.