Black ink tattoo of a spotted dog in an astronaut helmet drifting past stars and a dripping planet, on the side of the ribs, in fine line and dotwork.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Astronaut dog floating among stars

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A spotted dog wearing a round astronaut helmet floats on its back beside a dripping planet and several small star shapes. The outlines are clean and even, with dotwork stippling shading the dog's head, ears and body. The design is entirely in black ink on pale skin, with the figure sweeping diagonally across the torso.

Fine line Dotwork Ribs Dog Astronaut Helmet Space Star Planet Spots

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Hollin Cross believed Dot had really gone up, not even Mr Abbott who ran the chippy and swept the parish council's leaflets off the bus shelter. But the helmet was real. It had come out of a jumble-sale box marked "Leave it, it's broken", a fishbowl of a thing with a crack across the visor, and Dot wore it on the walk to the reservoir every Tuesday for a whole winter before anyone thought to ask why.

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What she did up there, the old folk say, was lie on her back and paddle at the dark. Her spots were the first constellation anyone ever named properly, and she kept them polished by rolling in the frost. Past the stars there was a planet the colour of a cheese scone left out in the rain, and it dripped. Every time it dripped, a small star came loose from its hook and dropped into the reservoir, and that is why the fish in Hollin Cross are so quiet in the mornings.

Then the council sent a man with a clipboard to measure the sky. He wrote Dot down as a hazard, a loose object in a flight path. Mrs Fenwick at the library wrote back that she would be the judge of that, and they argued about it for a month in the parish newsletter.

In the end Dot came down on a Sunday in March, and she came down the right way up, which the clipboard man said was impossible. She trotted up the chippy steps, shook the frost from her coat and asked Mr Abbott for a single chip. He gave her two. That was the whole of the landing, and the cracked visor still hangs behind the till, catching the light.