Colourful galaxy tattoo with connected constellation stars in pink, blue and purple, sitting on the ankle and lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Galaxy and constellation on an ankle

Ankle · Colour · Photo

A galaxy design covers the ankle and lower leg, with a nebula-like wash of blue, purple and pink shading into darker space. Bright white star points are joined by fine lines to form constellation patterns across the piece. The tattoo sits on a pale grey surface, with the foot cropped at the bottom edge of the frame.

Ankle Galaxy Nebula Star Constellation Space

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pickers had gone home by nine, leaving the ladders leant against the Bramleys like tired herons, and my grandfather still wouldn't let me switch off the lamp in the yard. 'Wait for the dark to settle,' he said, which was his way of telling me the sky was about to start doing something.

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It was the twelfth of August. He had planted the old orchard at Pennick Hill the year my mother was born, and he knew the trees the way other men know their dogs. We lay on a tarpaulin between the rows of Discovery apples, the fruit sweet in the air and a little rotten where it had dropped into the grass. Above us the Plough tipped over the ridge, and he showed me how to join the bright points into the Swan, the Archer and the crooked W of Cassiopeia, drawing each line in the air with one finger.

Then the first meteor cut across Lyra and we both forgot to speak. Then another, then three at once, streaking the Milky Way like someone dragging a match across black card. He counted them out loud. Nineteen by midnight, which he said was a poor showing for the Perseids and a fine one for an old man with a bad hip.

I asked him which star was his. He pointed to a faint one near the Fox, said it had been there since he was a boy, and that nobody could take it off him for the price of a ladder. In the morning I found a windfall in the grass with a bruise on its skin the same deep blue as the nebula he had shown me. I kept it on the windowsill until it shrivelled, the way you keep something you were told to keep.