Black and grey dotwork tattoo of two hands framing a sun, crescent moon and planets, placed on a calf.

Two hands, sun and planets on a calf

Dotwork · Calf · Mixed · Photo

Two stylised hands reach towards a central sun with radiating rays, surrounded by a crescent moon, a ringed planet, a small globe and several star shapes. The hands and planets are shaded with stippled dotwork, while the sun and rays use clean, open outlines. The design sits centrally on a pale leg against a dark background, with other tattoos partly visible above and below it.

Dotwork Calf Hand Sun Moon Planet Star Globe Text Shell

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, the lot of you, and pass that biscuit tin down here. No, the bottom one. Right. You want to know why old Tobias Marr always took his hat off to the sun? I'll tell you, because I was aboard the Carrow Lass the week we lost the coast of Portugal in a fog as thick as wet wool.

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Nine days we drifted. The compass card spun like a fish in a bucket, and the chronometer had been sulking since Lisbon. Tobias sat in his cabin with the brass orrery his father had made him, the little sun fixed in the middle, Earth on its wire, Saturn with a ring that always wobbled. Every noon he tried to take the sun with his quadrant, and every noon there was nothing but a grey smear behind the cloud. He'd tap the glass and curse the planets as if they owed him money.

On the ninth night the cabin boy, Ezra Penhale, a Cornish lad who could not read a word of Latin, came down with a candle and said the sky over the bow had gone clear. Tobias didn't believe him. But there it was, a crescent moon thin as a paring, and the stars sharp as pins. Tobias couldn't hold the quadrant steady with his shaking old hands, so Ezra held the brass while the old man read the moon's edge against the horizon. Between them they fixed our position to within a few miles, and the boy grinned like he'd invented the stars himself.

We raised the Scillies two days later. Tobias never again took a sighting alone, and when he died the orrery went to Ezra, who polished that little brass sun with the heel of his palm every morning until the day he too was buried. So when I see a clear sky now, I think of two pairs of hands on one quadrant, and of how the sea never once asked whose hand was steadier.