Forearm tattoo of three shaded grey cratered moons over a pink and blue nebula, joined by a thin line with an arrow tip, with a paper design beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cratered moons and nebula on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Three cratered, shaded grey spheres are strung along a thin black line that runs up the forearm and ends in a small arrow tip. The spheres sit over a soft background of pink, purple and blue clouds with scattered specks of white suggesting stars. A matching paper design lies on a white sheet beside the arm, and the shading on the spheres is smooth and dimensional.

Realism Forearm Moon Planet Nebula Galaxy Star Arrow Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The line had been pulled taut for six weeks when the cook came up to say the bread was gone, and Marta Oss told him to fetch the last of the salt pork instead, because the moons would not wait for anybody's supper.

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There were three of them, strung along the thread like beads on a fishwife's cord. The crew called the largest the Old Sack for its pitted face, the middle one the Widow, and the smallest Pip. Each was scarred from the falling stars that came screaming out of the north, and each was grey as a gull's back. Marta's grandmother had run the line from the masthead to the first of them before she died, and tied a little arrow at the top so no one would mistake which way was forward. Every night the clouds of the great nebula spread behind the moons like spilt dye, pink where the wind was warm and blue where it was cold, and every night the crew argued about whether the specks of light were stars or the eyes of something watching.

On the forty-first night the sky turned to ink and the line went slack. Marta hauled it in hand over hand, cursing the wet rope, and found the moons had not moved at all. The ship had. The current had carried them sideways for a week, and the arrow, which she had trusted like a priest, had been pointing at a cliff. She put the helm over, and the moons swung back into their places one by one, Pip last, as though they had been waiting for her to notice.

They raised the lighthouse at dawn. Marta tied the line to the quay post while the crew stood about the deck with nebula dust settling on their hair like flour, and nobody mentioned the bread, which they all agreed later was the finest thing they had eaten all voyage.