Full arm sleeve tattoo in colour showing a swirling galaxy, grey spaceships, a planet and a cartoon astronaut across the upper arm and forearm, photographed from four angles.

Full space sleeve with galaxy and spaceships

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A full arm sleeve shown in four side-by-side views of the same arm, running from the shoulder to the wrist. The design is a space scene with a swirling orange and red galaxy at the top, blue and purple nebula clouds, grey spaceships, a ringed planet and a small cartoon astronaut. The shading is smooth and painterly with soft gradients, and the cartoon figures sit among the nebula clouds near the lower arm.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Galaxy Nebula Spaceship Planet Astronaut Star Cloud Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boy came to the stall on the morning the big grey creature sat down in the hedge behind the fish market. Nobody else in Crossgate saw it, or they said they didn't, which in Crossgate is the same thing. Mother Hesketh sold charts of the sky from a trestle table, and he had bought one already, a pale blue sheet with the nebulae inked in like spilt paint. He came back wanting the one that showed the way out.

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'There is no way out,' she said, rolling a chart with her thumbs. 'There is only the way up, and that costs a copper a mile.' He counted out his coins: eleven pennies, a bent nail, and a button shaped like a moon. She took the button and gave him the chart anyway, because she had been a girl once too.

That night the creature came back and sat on the wall, its ears like folded leaves. Beside it a yellow craft the shape of a loaf of bread waited with its hatch open and its windows fogged. The boy climbed in with the chart under his jumper. The craft rose over the chimneys, past the grey ships that hung above the town like unlit lamps, and into the purple dark where the galaxy turned slowly, orange at its heart.

Morning found him back on the wall, alone, the chart folded smaller than before. In his palm was a star no bigger than a lentil, warm to the touch. He carried it to the stall and laid it on the trestle. Mother Hesketh looked at it for a long time. 'You've been up, then,' she said, and handed him the next chart for nothing.