Colour tattoo of planets, including a ringed planet and a banded planet, against a red swirling galaxy on a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful planets and galaxy on a calf

Calf · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a group of planets in a loose arc, including a banded orange planet, a ringed planet, and several blue and purple spheres, with a red spiral galaxy in the upper right. Soft gradient shading gives the planets volume, while scattered white stars and grey and teal cloud shapes fill the background. Colour ink dominates the design, and the planets are arranged to lead the eye down the leg.

Calf Planet Galaxy Spiral Star Cloud Space Nebula

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The vending machine on Ward Nine has swallowed your last pound, so you are standing in the lift lobby with a packet of crisps you did not pay for when Eli shuffles out in his hospital socks. He is eight, has a plaster cast up to the elbow, and has decided three in the morning is a perfectly reasonable time for questions. Bay four has settled. The monitors hum their small green tunes and the corridor smells of hand gel and burnt toast from the staff kitchen.

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Does Saturn really have rings, or is that just what the book says? You tell him the rings are mostly ice, lumps of it some as big as houses, all spinning round in a hurry. He wants to know if you could skate on them. You say probably not, unless your skates were very good. He takes the biro from your pocket and the back of his discharge leaflet, and draws a row of circles with the seriousness of a surveyor: a striped one, a ringed one, two blue ones he says are twins, and a red whirl in the corner like a jam roll left too long in the oven.

Dev, on the late porters' desk, has a key to the roof garden and lets you through without asking why two people in dressing gowns want the sky. The clouds are grey and furled at the edges, with a bruised teal glow behind them where the city lights bounce off. Eli cannot see the real planets through the haze, but he holds his drawing up anyway and matches each one to a dot of light he is certain of. Some of them, you admit, are aeroplanes.

At seven the day sister finds the leaflet pinned above the nurses' station, with a note in careful capitals: SATURN IS ICE. DO NOT SKATE. Underneath, in your handwriting, you have added the time, 3:40, and the words spinning round in a hurry, which seems the most useful thing you learned all night.