Black and grey dotwork flash designs on paper showing a teepee with a crescent moon, a UFO beaming up a small figure, and a rocket beside a crescent moon.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork flash of teepee, UFO and rocket

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

Three drawn tattoo designs sit on paper: a teepee with leaves and a crescent moon, a UFO with a beam lifting a small figure, and a rocket beside a crescent moon, all framed by clouds. Outlines are clean and bold, while the shading inside the frames and behind the rocket is built from stippled dots. The palette is entirely black ink on white, and the designs are arranged loosely across the sheet with a hand resting at the edge of the frame.

Dotwork Ufo Rocket Crescent moon Cloud Leaves Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mum had the tracing paper pinned flat under a jam jar when I came up from the engine room, three little frames inked across it like windows on a calendar. "Your uncle's been at it again," she said, not looking up from the brass she was rubbing with tiller oil. "Says the river's too dull for a man who wants to go to the moon."

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Uncle Eddie had never been further than Gainsborough, but he could draw. The teepee sat top left, leaves tumbling off its poles, a crescent hooked over the flap. Above it a saucer shed a single beam, and inside the beam a small dark shape that might have been a dog or a sack of coal. The rocket filled the bottom frame, stippled so thickly it looked like it had been rolled through frost.

"He wants me to do the dots," Mum said. "Forty years on the Trent and now I'm stippling skies."

I thought about the boat at night, the way the water turned pewter under the bridge lamps and the stars seemed to sink down and sit on the surface. Every frame on that sheet looked like something you'd see from the stern after the lock keeper had gone home.

On the last night of the month we ran the Adventurer up towards Cromwell Lock in the dark, and I stood on the roof with the paper folded in my coat. The cloud broke. Somewhere past the power station a light crossed the sky, slow and level, and I laughed out loud, because it was only a plane, and because Eddie would have wanted it to be something else.