Black and grey tattoo of a flying saucer beaming light over clouds, with stars and a comet, set in a circle on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flying saucer and comet on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A flying saucer beams light down towards a curved, horn-like shape above stylised clouds, all enclosed in a circular frame. Stars, a streaking comet and small dots fill the dark sky behind. Bold black outlines and solid fills contrast with the lighter skin, while the clouds are built from scalloped lines and stippled texture.

Traditional Blackwork Calf Flying saucer Ufo Star Cloud Horn Bubble Space

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and let the band have their tea. You want the story of the Tuesday the comet came over Sallow Bay, and you won't get it standing. My grandmother was the only one in the Marine Ballroom who saw the saucer come down, because she was the only one not dancing, and she said it hummed like a fridge left open in a larder.

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It had been a wet summer. The dairy man, Ezra Pellow, had lost a heifer to the bog, and he went up the top field with a lamp to look for her. Instead he found a silver dish sitting on the hedge with a light poured out of its belly, straight down onto the grass. Where the light fell, the cloud had rolled up in scalloped curls like the sea does before weather, and in the middle of it, stuck fast in the mud, was a curled white horn as long as a bus.

He ran down to the Marine with mud to his knees and told nobody but the bandleader, who said Ezra had been at the cider again. Then the comet came over the headland, trailing its three bright hairs across the stars, and the whole hall spilled out onto the promenade to gawp. The saucer lifted its beam off the field like a man lifting a sack, and for a minute the horn hung in the light, turning, while the dancers in their shiny shoes cheered it.

By morning the field was bare and Ezra's heifer was grazing in Cornwall, or so the postcard said. Nobody ever agreed on what the horn was. My grandmother kept a button from the saucer's hatch in her purse until she died, and it still hums when the wireless is on. Now the band is tuning up, so go on, get up and dance before the comet comes back round.