Black line drawing of a sun with triangular rays and planets, including a ringed Saturn, arranged along dashed orbit paths as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun and planets on dashed orbits

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A fine black line drawing shows a sun with triangular rays at the centre, surrounded by planets placed along dashed circular orbit paths. Saturn has a ringed outline, and several planets use hatching, stippling or stripes for shading. The design is black on a white background, with an open, evenly spaced composition.

Fine line Dotwork Sun Planet Saturn Solar system Orbit Space

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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

The pass closed at noon, and by four the snow had filled the lane to the gatepost, so the landlady, Mrs Ashdown, gave you the attic room over the bar and a candle that smelled of tallow. You were not meant to stay. You had come up the valley to deliver a brass orrery to a man who had died a week before you arrived, and now the box sat unopened on the table between the coat hooks and the fire.

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Beneath the orrery's lid you found a child's exercise book, the pages ruled in pencil, each planet drawn with a careful hand. Saturn wore its ring at a slant, as if it had been knocked. Mars was hatched with fine strokes and Jupiter was striped like boiled sweets. The sun sat in the middle with its rays drawn as sharp triangles, and the orbits were dashed rather than solid, because the dead man's daughter, the landlady said, had insisted that nothing in the sky was ever really closed.

On the third night the snow stopped and the sky cleared hard and black. You took the book out to the yard and held the pages up against the stars, counting the lights that did not flicker. Above the byre a steady orange point moved against the others. You checked the drawing and found it where the dashed line bent outward past the last planet. Mrs Ashdown came out in her shawl and stood beside you without asking what you had found.

"She drew that one the winter she was nine," she said. "Said it was the one that had got away." In the morning the road was open. You left the orrery on the bar with the exercise book tucked inside its lid, and you did not look back at the little dashed circle, though you could feel it going round.