Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a gold armillary sphere with stars, set against purple and teal shading, on the outer forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Armillary sphere on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A gold armillary sphere with two inner orbs sits at the centre of the design, ringed by small purple and pink stars. Bold black outlines define the rings and orbs, with soft purple, pink and teal shading behind them. Partial flowers and leaves in teal, orange and purple appear at the left edge, with a teal star at the lower right.

Neo-trad Forearm Star Flower Leaves Celestial Orb Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't fidget with it, pet. The brass rings are older than this block and they don't like being shaken. That's the thing your great-uncle Eli carried up fourteen floors of Kestrel House in a biscuit tin, the winter the lifts first gave up for good. He said a man should always know where he stood in the sky, even if he couldn't see the sky from his kitchen.

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See the two little glass orbs in the middle? He called them the sun and the moon, though the old men at the Co-op said they were only marbles from a sweet jar. Eli didn't argue with the Co-op. He argued with the council, and with the lad from the housing office who wanted everyone out by March. He painted the little stars on the inside of the gold band himself, one at a time, with a brush he'd bought for model aeroplanes. Every one of them was a star he'd watched from the balcony on floor nine.

When the men came with their clipboards, Eli was up on the balcony with the sphere on his knee, turning the rings until they lined up with the Plough over the cranes at the canal. He wouldn't come down. He said if the rings were true, the building would be too, for an hour at least.

The sun in the glass caught the last of the evening and threw a teal light across the concrete. 'There,' he said, and tapped the brass. 'Now you know where you are.'