Watercolour design of the sun, Saturn, Jupiter, Earth and smaller planets against pink and blue clouds, drawn as a tattoo design with no body part shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour solar system with sun and planets

Colour · Flash

A painted design showing a sun with radiating rays at the top, with Earth, a ringed Saturn, a banded Jupiter and several smaller planets stacked down the centre. Pink, blue and purple watercolour clouds fill the background, with soft drips running down the lower half. The planets have fine ink outlines and shaded detail, while the sun and clouds are loosely washed in colour.

Sun Planet Saturn Earth Cloud Space

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair pulled out of Hatherley at four in the morning, and by the time the lorries reached the ring road I had paint under my nails and the backdrop for the big wheel still rolled across my knees. Dad always said the sky was the easiest thing to sell on a fairground, because nobody ever looks at it closely. He was wrong about that, though he never admitted it.

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Ruth, who ran the cakewalk, had asked for planets. Not a sky, she said, but a proper solar system, the kind pinned up in primary schools, with the sun at the top throwing its rays like a fistful of straw. So I pinned the cloth flat in the back of the caravan and started with the clouds, washing pink into blue until the colours bled together and ran down the bottom edge, the way they do when you don't stop them. Then the sun, a loose gold disc with spokes of brass leaf. Then the planets stacked down the middle: Earth the size of a teacup, Jupiter wearing its bands like a cardigan, and Saturn, whose ring I drew in fine black ink, because I never trust a brush with a circle.

The old boy who used to run the orrery booth came by on our last night in Doncaster. He had lost most of his hearing and some of his patience, but he tapped the canvas where a small orange dot sat near the bottom. "Mars," he said. "You've put it on the wrong side of the others." I told him the others were where the paper had room. He grunted, then said the planets had never once stayed in the order anyone drew them, and that was rather the point of them.

Next morning the wheel turned over a field in Wakefield with the sun catching the light on its spokes, and the washes had dried into something softer than I'd meant. Ruth stood at the foot of the ramp and looked up for a long while without saying a word. Then she paid me in cash and a paper bag of candyfloss, and the drips down the lower half of the cloth stayed where I had let them fall, pink and blue, because by then I had stopped wanting to wipe them away.