Black and grey realism tattoo of a chimpanzee in a space suit and helmet, with stars behind it, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chimpanzee astronaut on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A chimpanzee wearing a white space helmet and a bulky astronaut suit floats against a dark starfield, with a tether trailing beside it. The subject is rendered with fine, soft shading that gives the fur, suit fabric and helmet glass a strong sense of volume. The design is in black and grey only, and it wraps up the limb with the figure centred and small stars scattered in the background.

Realism Forearm Monkey Astronaut Helmet Star Space

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The x-ray screen showed the helmet first, a pale dome sitting in the middle of the bag like an egg, and the man beside me said, "Mind the visor." It was half past five on a wet Tuesday at Harwick Crossing, the lorries had backed up to the barrier, and I had my gloves on and my patience half used.

Keep reading

We unzipped it on the steel table. Inside was a suit cut for something smaller than a man, the white gone the colour of weak tea, with a tether clipped to one shoulder and a name tape sewn over the chest: PIM. He said Pim had flown the loop of a travelling fair in a painted capsule, back when the fairground lads still thought the moon was a sort of prize. He had no paperwork beyond a curled programme with a rocket on the cover and a chimp grinning out of the porthole.

I asked him what he was declaring. He thought about it for longer than I liked. "Stars," he said, and pointed at the lining, where someone had stitched tiny white dots across the dark cloth in a patient, uneven scatter. "My father did those in the back of a van. Took him a winter." His daughter lived in Lyon, he said, and she had asked for something from before she was born.

I stamped the form, not the bag. Behind me the lorries were moving at last, their headlamps sliding across the wet tarmac, and I watched him walk off with the helmet under one arm, the visor catching our floodlights like a small, cold moon.