Colour tattoo of a rebel-style emblem on the upper arm, with blue, purple and orange galaxy shading filling the shapes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Galaxy-filled rebel emblem on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo is a circular emblem with a wing-like cross shape and a split, cog-like form, outlined in solid black. Its interior is filled with blue, purple and orange cosmic shading that looks like a nebula, with soft gradients and small pale speckles. The emblem sits centred on the upper arm against a patterned floral fabric in the background.

Upper arm Emblem Galaxy Nebula Circle Cog

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are still wiping plum paint off your knuckles when the lookout strikes the bell twice, which on the Corran Mary means the owners' launch has been sighted on the horizon. Tomasz is already halfway up the foremast with the tin of lamp-black, and the emblem you have spent three nights shading onto the funnel cowl is still wet. The circle is finished. The split cog cuts through its middle like a seam, and the crescent wing curls around the edge the way the union men chalked it on the dock gates in Valparaíso.

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Mostly the shading was Tomasz's idea. He said a cog on its own looked like a bolt on a shipping invoice, so the two of you mixed ultramarine with a spoonful of the bosun's indigo and feathered the insides until they looked like the sky at four in the morning, with a bruise of violet near the teeth and a smear of orange where the lamp oil dripped. You never managed the pale specks. Tomasz flicked those on with a toothbrush, laughing, while the cook pretended not to watch.

The owners' man comes aboard at dawn with a clerk and a ledger full of wage deductions. He stands at the rail a long while looking up at the funnel, then looks at you, the second mate who signed the draft on Thursday, and you wait for him to order it scrubbed. Instead he asks who did the shading. Nobody answers. He tilts his head, reads the cog, and says the stars look as if they were there first.

That night you take the sextant to the taffrail, sight the Southern Cross low over the wake, and write the bearing in the log in your own hand. Below you the funnel still carries its circle, dripping blue in the lamplight. You do not paint over it. Under the position, in small capitals, you write the one word the crew has been passing along the rail all week: kept.