Colour tattoo of a galaxy inside a circle, crossed by a black spiral and dotted crosshair lines, on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Galaxy circle with spiral on upper back

Geometric · Back · Colour · Photo

A circle filled with purple and blue nebula shading and small white star dots sits on the upper back. A fine black spiral curls inward across the circle, with a dotted outer ring and dashed crosshair lines running through the centre. The colour washes are soft and blended, set against the black linework and dotwork on pale skin.

Geometric Dotwork Back Galaxy Nebula Spiral Star Circle Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the autumn the Merriweather Brothers Travelling Circus had sold the elephant, the calliope and most of the canvas, and what was left of us fitted into two wagons and a borrowed lorry. Nobody wanted the big top any more. So when Nell Varga asked to set her brass telescope up under the sagging centre pole, Father Penhale only shrugged and said the sky was free, which was more than the bank could say.

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She had ground the lens herself in a wagon outside Bristol, polishing it with her thumb and a tin of rouge. Every night after the last turn she dragged a stool out onto the sawdust, tightened the crosshairs against the wire, and called the audience in off the car park one at a time. Eleven people came the first week. Two of them were the box office girl and a boy from the chip shop who said he was only there for the tea urn.

On the thirteenth night she tilted the tube north and waved me over. A pale whorl turned in the glass, its arms unspooling like ribbon off a bobbin. 'That's a whole sky,' she said, 'hundreds of billions of suns, and it turns so slowly we'll never see it finish.' I told her she sounded like a ringmaster. She laughed and said a ringmaster needed an audience to believe him, and the stars didn't.

The tent came down in November. Nell took the telescope in the last wagon and left me the lens cap, which was just a bit of painted tin with a dot in the middle. I still keep it in my coat pocket. On clear nights I stand in the car park with it pressed to my eye, find a dim patch of sky, and let it go round without me.