Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a sun with radiating rays and a row of planets, one with rings, running down a forearm.

Sun and planets along a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a stippled sun with a ring of small dots and fine radiating rays, above a dotted line that leads down to a row of planets. The planets are shaded with dense stipple, and the ringed planet has fine linework for its rings. The black and white close-up shows a forearm against a plain, light background.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Sun Planet Solar system Saturn Ray Orbit Space

Find an artist for this

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

Mind the cat, Ailsa, she's had the good cushion since breakfast and she'll not shift for the likes of us. Pass me that tin of matches. No, the lamp can stay dark. I want you to see the sun the way my grandfather drew it for me, with his finger on the flagstone floor, because he never trusted a thing he couldn't count.

Keep reading

He took a nail to the slate by the back door and went at it with small, patient knocks, dot after dot, until the sun came up out of the stone. Then he ran lines out from it like the spokes of a boat's wheel, long ones and short ones, and dotted rings round its middle so it would not blaze the whole thing out. Below it he set a line of stones going down the slope towards the harbour. The first was small and close to the sun. The next was a little bigger, then came a great striped one he called the giant of the lot, and then the ringed one, which he would not let me touch because the rings were the most delicate thing in the world.

Each stone had its own road of dots, and each went round the sun without once bumping into its neighbour. That was the trick, he said. Everything in its own lane, and the sun doing the holding. When I asked who was holding the sun he laughed and said that was a question for the sea.

The last stone was dark and no bigger than a pebble, and he told me it was the one that wandered furthest, out where the light went thin. Then he rubbed the line out with his thumb and said, now you find where you are standing. I looked down at my own feet on the cold flags and realised the dotted road ran right out of the door, down the path and into the water, and I was already on it.