Colour tattoo of a blue police box set against a bright galaxy of stars and dots, on the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue police box in a colourful galaxy on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A blue police box with lit windows and a glowing light on its roof sits at the centre of the design. Around it, sparkling four-pointed stars and clusters of dots fill the background in orange, pink, purple and teal. The inset close-up shows the soft, blended shading of the cosmic background and the crisp outlines of the star shapes.

Upper arm Police box Tardis Galaxy Star Sparkle Dot Space Window

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold the lamp still, Tomas, or the sea takes the shape of it and you'll be seeing my face in the water all night. Right. The winter the Mary Hale went out past the Dogger with her nets half mended, the sky went wrong. Not dark. Full. Every star you ever counted, and some you wouldn't have bothered to count, spilled out over the swell like sugar on a cloth, orange and violet and a green that had no business at sea.

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That's when the box came up out of it. Blue, square as a chapel door, sitting on the water as if it had walked there. Four panes lit yellow along its face and a lamp burning on its roof like a sunrise that had forgotten the hour. Old Eli Garrow swore a man stepped out, but he also swore his teeth were gold, so you weigh that. What the rest of us saw was the dots rising up round its corners, bright as plankton, and the four-pointed stars winking in the swell where no star had any reason to be.

Skipper Ross had the wheel. He didn't haul away. He ran the boat straight at the blue box, and the nearer we came, the quieter the sea got, until the engine sounded like someone humming in the next room. The door opened a crack. Light came out, and in it the nets, every knot and cork of them, lifted off the deck and hung in the air like washing, and then they simply were mended.

We came home with the best haul in forty years. Ross never touched that wheel again without touching the pocket where he keeps a scrap of painted sky he picked off the hull, the only piece of it that stayed. So when the weather turns strange and the gulls go silent, look up, and if the stars are spilling wrong, you'll know what they're for. Now bail that bucket, boy, and mind the light.