Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a sun with a face and orbiting planets on the inside of a forearm, with a small cluster of stars.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun and planets on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a sun with a human face and rays, with several planets sitting on thin curved orbital lines. A small group of stars runs down the side of the arm. The planets and the dotted band beneath the sun are shaded with stippled dots, while the orbits and rays are drawn in clean black linework. The design is set in black and grey and wraps around the forearm.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Sun Planet Orbit Star Face Celestial

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The damp had got into the Alnmouth tower by October, and Nell Garrow spent her mornings on the flagstones with a magnifier and a tin of sepia ink, copying what the sea air had not yet eaten. Sir Hugh Vesey's star charts lay open on a trestle under a sheet of oilcloth. Most of them were sums of wind and tide. The last one was a sun with a face.

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It had been drawn in a fury of rays, and the engraver had stippled the planets with dots so fine they looked like sand thrown at the paper. Five of them rode on thin curved orbits. Nell counted them twice, then a third time, because the sixth orbit had been scratched out and filled with a single word in a clerk's hand: returned. Beneath the sun a dotted band ran like a dry riverbed, and along the margin someone had pricked a line of small stars, each a little smaller than the last, as if walking away.

The housekeeper, Mrs Pell, brought tea and asked what the old man had been looking for. Nell said she didn't know, which was true. She had only ever been asked to copy what was there, and the sun's face, when she finally inked it, looked more tired than it had any right to, its mouth set like someone who has watched the same orbit come round too many times.

She stippled the last planet at dusk, a fat grey world beyond the scratched orbit, and when the lamp guttered she saw the sun had tilted toward it, just slightly, the way a sleeper turns toward a voice. She closed the plate, wrote her name in the margin, and left the sixth orbit empty.