Black and grey tattoo on an upper arm of an astronaut standing on a rocky surface and holding a cratered moon-shaped balloon on a string.

Astronaut with a moon balloon on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A cartoon-style astronaut stands on a rocky lunar surface, holding a string attached to a balloon shaped like a cratered moon. The linework is bold and dark, with light grey shading on the helmet, suit and moon. The composition runs vertically down the upper arm, with the moon at the top and the ground line at the bottom.

Upper arm Astronaut Moon Balloon Space Rock Crater String

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost has turned the lower field to pewter by the time you reach the gate, and the string keeps tugging at your wrist like a dog that has spotted a rabbit. Your gran always said the moon was bad luck to take out in February, but she is in the farmhouse now with the kettle on, and the moon is yours until somebody says otherwise.

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You walk the ridge where the ploughed furrows have set hard as bread. Crows lift off the hedge as you pass. The moon bobs above you, grey and pocked, its craters dabbed in by a careful hand that had nothing better to do on a Sunday. Behind the barn a tractor coughs, goes quiet, and you think about the men who walked on the real one, and whether the ground gave under their boots the way this field gives under yours.

At the dead oak by the pond, the string goes slack. Your father said the balloon would drift off by morning and be lost over Lincolnshire, but you wind the end twice round the lowest branch instead and pull the knot tight. The rime cracks under your heels. Your breath rises and hangs there, the way it does in the photographs of the spacesuit visors, all fog and no face.

You climb back over the stile before the light goes, leaving the moon to keep watch over the sheep and the iron-hard puddles. Behind you the astronaut stays put on his rocks, one hand raised to the string, waiting for someone to come back and tell him it is safe to let go.