Four views of a colourful realism full sleeve on an upper arm and forearm, showing a spiral galaxy, planets, a spaceship and a bare tree under a moon.

Full sleeve space and moonlit landscape

Realism · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The sleeve shows a cosmic scene running from the shoulder to the wrist, with a spiral galaxy at the top, a grey spaceship, cratered orange and red planets, and a large shaded moon. Lower down, a bare tree, telegraph poles and a snowy blue landscape sit beneath a glowing aurora-like nebula. Soft gradients and fine highlights give the planets and moon a three-dimensional look, and the bold pinks, purples, teals and yellows dominate the composition.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Galaxy Spaceship Planet Moon Nebula Star Tree Landscape Space

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time the Greywater hauler clears the last of the ringed moons, you have stopped counting the planets. Orange ones, cratered like old bread, slide past the viewport one after another, and the pilot Ishbel hums through her teeth when she thinks you are asleep. You are not asleep. You have been watching the aurora bloom green and rose along the edge of the nebula for three days, and you know its colours the way you know your mother's handwriting.

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The landing is a long, unlovely business. Ishbel sets you down on a frozen field two valleys from the settlement, where the telegraph poles still stand in a crooked line because nobody has ever seen the point of pulling them up. Snow sifts across the road. A bare oak leans over the verge, black against a sky so blue it looks wet, and the moon hangs above it like a coin someone forgot to spend. You shoulder the crate and start walking.

The wire hums when you pass under it. That is the thing you had forgotten, out there where everything is quiet and lit from inside. Somebody on the far side of the ridge still keeps the lines strung, still climbs the poles in winter to fix what the wind has taken. At the gate of the farmhouse a lamp burns in the kitchen window, and a figure in a grey coat stands very still on the step, as if she has been there since the last transmission reached her.

You set the crate down in the snow. Behind you the ship is only a glint sliding back up into the dark, and the spiral galaxy you once flew through has shrunk to a smudge you could cover with a thumb. You lift your hand. She lifts hers. Neither of you says anything, because there is nothing either of you needs to explain, and the wire goes on humming over both of you all the way down the road.