Colour tattoo of a red-eyed alien figure in a dark suit holding an orange object, shown in three side-by-side views on a forearm, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Alien figure in a black suit on an arm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large humanoid alien figure with a wrinkled, brown-grey head, red eyes and a textured red mouth area is shown from the front, wearing a dark suit. A black-gloved hand holds a glowing orange, round object in front of its body. The shading is smooth and painterly with bold dark outlines, and the warm orange and red tones contrast with the black. The photo shows the same tattoo from three angles side by side.

Neo-trad Forearm Alien Figure Suit Glove Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time the orange sphere began to hum, Oszandrel had been standing at the customs hatch for eleven hours without once lowering it. He held the thing the way a verger holds a collection plate, black-gloved fingers spread beneath it, and he would not say where it came from. Forty of us had walked past him. I was the only fool enough to stop.

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I am a clerk in the Kessel Ring Manifest Office, which means my job is to stamp things and be blamed for them. The sphere was not on any manifest. Its glow pulsed slower than a heartbeat, and when I held my scanner near it the readings came back as a sunset, which is not a reading at all. Oszandrel's eyes, rust-red and wet, followed my pen. He asked me, in the careful Galactic Standard he had learned from voice tapes, whether I had ever been given something I could not return.

I told him no. He nodded as if that were the answer he had hoped for, then lifted the sphere, and I saw that its surface was split along a seam, the way a peach splits when it has been left too long in the sun. Inside was no fruit but a folded map of the sector, every route lit in amber, and one of them ran straight through my own desk.

I stamped his form that night. Under Reason for Entry I wrote Returned, and under Owner I wrote his name. I have kept the carbon copy in my breast pocket ever since, because the sphere has not stopped humming, the ring has gone quiet, and somewhere a route is still lit.