Fine line black ink tattoos of a sun, a ringed planet and a crescent moon, one on each of three fingers of a hand resting on a light fabric surface.

Sun, planet and moon finger tattoos

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Three small black line tattoos sit on separate fingers: a sun with rays, a ringed planet and a crescent moon. The linework is thin and even, with simple outlines and no shading. The hand rests on a pale textured fabric, with soft natural light and a plain, close composition.

Fine line Hand Sun Planet Moon Space Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find Priya by the squash table before she finds you, mostly because she is holding her paper cup the way she used to hold a biro in Mr Okafor's astronomy club, thumb tucked underneath as if it might roll away. The sports hall smells of floor polish and lukewarm sausage rolls. Someone has pinned up a banner that reads WELCOME BACK, YEAR ELEVEN, and the W has already come loose at one corner.

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Twenty years ago, the three of you spent a whole Saturday at the market in Kettering, where a stall sold fine-nibbed pens by the handful. You took them to the back row of the science block and drew on each other's fingers during double chemistry: a sun for Priya, who burned at everything; a ringed planet for Tom, who would talk about Saturn until the bell rang; and a crescent moon for you, because you were the one who stayed up reading. The ink lasted eleven days. At fifteen, that felt like a promise.

Tom is in Leeds, Priya tells you, doing something with telescopes that she explains and you immediately forget. Then she lifts her finger and there is the sun, faded to a grey-blue smudge, its rays blurred into the knuckle. You lift yours and the moon is only a comma now. Neither of you says that you had assumed they were gone. Priya pulls out her phone and shows you a photo Tom sent last spring: a planet, freshly gone over in ink, the ring so sharp it looks like it could cut.

When the DJ starts playing something from the year you all left, you take a biro from the drinks table and ask Priya to hold still. Under the strip lights, with the music too loud to talk over, you trace the moon again, slowly, the way you once did in chemistry, and she redraws the sun on your wrist with her tongue between her teeth. For one song, at least, the three of you are back under the same sky.