Colour tattoo of a floating astronaut with pink, blue and purple watercolour splashes on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floating astronaut on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A small astronaut in a helmet and suit drifts with outstretched arms against a background of soft pink, blue and purple splashes. The figure is rendered with fine shading and realistic highlights, while the splashes and a trailing drip below the feet are softer and more painterly. Colour ink dominates the composition, which is set on the outer upper arm.

Upper arm Astronaut Space Splashes Helmet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Fenwick House had been dead since Easter, so Tomasz carried the tin of watercolours up fourteen flights in a carrier bag that kept catching on the banisters. His sister Ola was waiting on the landing with her knees pulled up, pretending not to care whether he came. "Mum says you're not allowed on the roof," she said. "I'm not going on the roof. I'm going to the window."

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The stairwell window faced east over the car park and the railway cutting, and for a month the glass had been smeared with a grey film nobody had bothered to clean. Tomasz had brought a sponge, a bucket of warm water and the pinks and blues from the market stall. He wet the pane, dabbed a wash of violet into it, and the colour bled outward the way cloud does when you leave it alone. Ola watched the splashes spread until they looked like something exploding slowly in a dark room.

He painted a small figure in the middle, a man in a helmet with his arms out, drifting. It was hard to keep the proportions right with a brush on glass. The suit came out too fat and the boots too long, and when he went over the legs again the paint ran down in a thin purple line that stopped just above the sill. Ola laughed and said he'd made it fall. "He's not falling," Tomasz said. "He's just let go of something."

Next morning Mr Dunne the caretaker came up with his keys and stood on the landing with his hands in his pockets for a long time. He didn't wipe it off. He said the lift would be fixed by Friday, that the window needed doing anyway, and that he'd tell the council it was the children's idea of a sky. Ola pressed her forehead to the cool glass and found the drip, still wet at the bottom, pointing down toward the car park like a rope someone was letting out slowly.