Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a sun, stacked planets and dotted geometric lines on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun and planets on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A stippled sun with radiating rays sits at the top, with a column of planets below it, including one with a ringed outline, and a small planet off to the left. Fine dotted lines form a diamond-shaped framework that runs down the forearm, with a small number 42 above the sun. The piece is shaded in black and grey with dense dotwork on the sun and planets, set against smooth skin and a grey background.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Sun Planet Solar system Ray Dotted line Geometric line Saturn

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Carrow House has been dead since Tuesday, so you take the stairs with the torch from the cupboard under the bins, counting landings the way your nan counted rosary beads. Twenty-two, twenty-three. The stairwell smells of bleach and somebody's Sunday chips, and somewhere above you a telly is selling car insurance to nobody.

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On the roof the wind shoves the fire door back against your shoulder and the whole estate spreads out below, orange under the streetlamps. Mr Okafor from flat nine is already there, hunched over a telescope he borrowed from the primary school, its tripod legs tied together with a dog lead. He doesn't look round. 'Saturn's up,' he says. 'Ring's tilted this month. Get on it before the cloud comes.'

You squint into the eyepiece and there it is, a pale bead with a smudge around its middle, further away than anything you have ever had to wait for. He tells you about the sun he painted on the wall of the stairwell, with rays reaching out toward the lift shaft, and about the number 42 he put above it. 'Answer to everything,' he says. You ask him what the question is. He shrugs. 'Nobody's told me yet. I'm still on the stairs.'

Before you go down, you tear the corner off a bus timetable, write your flat number on it in biro, and slide it under the brick by the telescope leg. Tomorrow someone will find it, or the wind will take it over the ring road. Either way the lift will still be broken, and the planets will keep their own time, which is more than the council can say.