Black fine line tattoo of two hands reaching towards each other, with dotted lines hanging planets, a sun and moon phases, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two hands with planets on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two stylised hands, one above the other, reaching towards each other across the design. Dotted lines hang from the fingers of the upper hand and carry small planets, a Saturn-like ringed planet, moon phases and a radiating sun at the centre. The work is in thin black outline with no shading, and it sits centred on the skin with plenty of space around it.

Fine line Upper arm Hand Planet Sun Moon Saturn Celestial Dotted line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp had gone out twice before the mate thought to ask why the sailors would not whistle after dark. Old Harrow, who had carried salt cod up from Shetland for forty years, only shook his head and pointed to the sky over the bow, where the stars lay thick as spilt flour.

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Harrow said there was a woman who lived up there, somewhere past the last of the lights, who strung the planets on threads from her fingertips the way a girl strings beads. Her name was never spoken aboard. She let them hang low so the sailors could read their way home, and she let them swing so the wind had something to push against. If a man went to her with an empty hand, she would lift one planet down and set it in his palm, and that planet would carry him through his worst winter.

The mate laughed until he saw the hands. Two of them, long-fingered and pale, came down through the rigging on a night of flat calm water. One held the threads of little worlds: a ringed Saturn, a sliver of moon, a dim cold ball. The other reached up beneath them, cupped and waiting, as if it had waited a very long time for someone to take the sun from the middle and hand it back.

Nobody aboard was brave enough to ask whose hands they were. In the morning the galley boy found a single brass button on the deck, warm as a coal. The mate pocketed it without a word, and the ship came into Leith two days early.