Black and grey fine line tattoo of a vertical row of planets, including one with rings, and small dots for stars, on the side of a thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vertical row of planets and stars on a thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical column of small planets runs down the skin, decreasing in size towards the bottom, with one ringed planet near the centre. Small dots scattered around the column suggest stars. The linework is fine and the planets are lightly shaded in black and grey, set against plain pale skin with a simple background.

Fine line Thigh Planet Solar system Saturn Star

Find an artist for this

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

Mr Hollis wants the planets painted in order, smallest at the foot of the dome, because he says the eye should fall down the sky the way a dropped penny falls. I told him the penny would beat my brush to the floor. He did not laugh, so I began with Mercury, a pinprick of lamp-black no bigger than a full stop, and worked my way up the plaster like a sweep going up a chimney.

Keep reading

Saturn was the trouble. The ring has to be thinner than a hair and still show from the back of the hall, so I mixed graphite with gum arabic and drew it three times before he would let me stop. He watched from the stepladder with his wife's brooch pinned to his waistcoat, a little ringed silver thing she wore to every lecture until the winter she didn't. He said nothing about it. He only asked me to put the stars in between, flicked from the brush so they landed uneven, because he said the real sky never kept its spacing either.

On the last evening he climbed up to check the work and tapped the blue wash where Earth sat, then frowned at it. I had made it too big, fat and lopsided, and I was already reaching for the rag. He stopped my hand. Leave it, he said. Someone standing under it will want to find their own house in the sky, and they'll always look for the biggest thing first. So I left it, and at the very bottom of the column, below the smallest planet, he asked me for one more dot. I gave it to him, the size of a seed, and he signed the plaster beside it in pencil so faintly that only the dust could read it.