Realistic full moon with small stars and a purple and blue night sky tattooed across a shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Full moon and night sky on a shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A large, detailed full moon sits centre frame, shaded in greys and white with visible craters and highlights. Soft purple, blue and dark clouds fill the background, with small white stars scattered around the moon. The soft, blended shading and the moon's rounded form give the piece a three-dimensional look across the curve of the shoulder.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Moon Night sky Star Cloud Nebula

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mother had turned the vacancies board to NO by six, so the only guest left on the top landing that October was the man in number seven, who paid a week in advance and never once asked for a towel. I was sent up to the attic for the spare eiderdowns and found the skylight already silvered over, the full moon hanging above the grey bay so close and clear I could count the seams in its face. Dad used to say it knew the tides better than the harbour master did, and that you could set your boat by it if you had the patience to sit still.

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Mr Harker was standing under the skylight when I turned round, a cold cup of tea in one hand. He had been up here most evenings, sitting on an upturned crate with a pencil and a sheet of cartridge paper pinned to his knee. I had assumed he was drawing the harbour. He held the paper up now without a word. It was the sky, blue-black and smudged with violet where the clouds came in, and in the middle a moon so carefully shaded that the craters seemed to have depth.

"Took me three weeks to get the light on the left side right," he said. "Every time I thought I had it, the real one moved."

I asked whether he was leaving, because the trunk by the door had been strapped shut since Tuesday. He said the Saturday train, and then he tapped the corner of the paper where he had pricked tiny holes with a pin, dozens of them, each one a star. "You have to hold them up to the light," he said, "or they disappear." We held it up together until the moon had climbed past the glass, and the only thing left in the skylight was our two faces and the small bright holes in the paper.