Small black comet tattoo with streaking tail and dots on the upper arm of a person with raised arm, resting on a yellow patterned fabric.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Comet tattoo on the upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small comet with a rounded head and three tapering streaks trails up and to the left, with a few dots scattered beside the tail. The linework is dark and fairly bold, with the head shaded in solid ink and the tail lines left open. The tattoo is in black ink on pale skin, set against a bright yellow fabric with white abstract shapes, and the frame is cropped to the arm and a grey top.

Upper arm Star Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nan Oyelaran kept the last working telescope on the twelfth floor of Harrow Court, a brass thing with a cracked eyepiece that she had bought off a man at a car boot sale in 1971. Every August the children of the block came up the stairwell in a crowd, dropping crisps on the landings, and she let them take turns at the lens. Nobody had ever seen a comet from there, because the sky over the estate was orange with streetlamps and the tower blocks were too close together to let a person see past them.

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Then one wet evening a boy called Tomasz came up alone, soaked to the knees, and said his little sister had told him the stars were falling. Nan told him stars did not fall, they only seemed to. Still, she tilted the brass tube toward the gap above the car park, and there it was, a small hard light with three long tails behind it like the bristles of a broom, and a scatter of faint dots spilled along its path as though someone had sown seed.

Tomasz looked for a long time. Then he asked whether it would hit the block. Nan said it would burn out long before it reached Earth, and that a thing like that had been travelling for a thousand years to get to this one pane of glass. He thought about that and nodded, and went home dry-shoed for the first time that month.

The next morning the caretaker found a new mark on the stairwell wall in pencil, a comet with a round head and streaks behind it, and under it, in careful capitals, the words NOT FALLING, JUST PASSING.