Black and blue city skyline with a large moon above it, tattooed across a man's upper arm and shoulder.

City skyline and moon on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A tattoo of a city skyline with tall towers and a large moon across the top of the upper arm and shoulder. The buildings are rendered in loose black linework and grey shading, with dripping ink lines running down the lower part of the design. Blue wash accents appear around the moon and the base of the buildings, against a plain grey sleeveless top.

Upper arm Shoulder City Skyline Moon Skyscraper Building Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift went dead on the ninth floor, so Maureen Okafor carried a tin of black gloss up the last eleven flights with a brush wrapped in newspaper stuck in her back pocket. Halsey House had been scheduled for grey paint since March. The council had never thought to ask whether anyone looked at the roof door from the street, but everyone on the estate did, because it was the only thing on the block that faced the river.

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On the roof the towers across the water were lit in their usual sodium orange, and the moon sat low over the gasworks flats like a coin somebody had dropped. Maureen didn't sketch first. She had learned those shapes from a bus window for thirty years: the spike of the Carlisle Tower, the stepped shoulders of the Brook Wharf offices, the grid of lit windows where the cleaners worked late. She began at the top with the moon, dabbing the craters with the tip of the brush, then dragged a blue wash thinned with turps down from its edge like a bruise spreading.

Her nephew Tobi came up at half eleven, breathing hard, wanting to know what she thought she was doing. "Making it look like somewhere," she said. He asked who was going to pay for the repaint. She told him the drips were the point. Every line ran down the door and stopped just above the gutter, as if the city had been left out in the rain and had decided to keep the wet on it. Tobi stood beside her for a long time without saying anything. Then he handed her the second tin.

By dawn the grey door was a skyline with the moon hanging over it, and the real moon had slid behind the gasworks flats, leaving the painted one to do the work. Across the car park a kitchen light came on, then another, then a third, one window at a time, as though the whole estate had been waiting for the picture to be finished before it got up.