Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a glass jar filled with planets and a spiral galaxy, with a FAR AWAY label, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Galaxy in a jar on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A mason jar with a metal lid holds a night sky of stars, a ringed planet like Saturn, a smaller planet and a spiral galaxy. The label across the middle reads FAR AWAY in block capitals, and the outline is bold and black. The sky and galaxy are shaded with fine stippled dots, and the photograph is taken straight on against a blurred dark background.

Dotwork Forearm Jar Galaxy Planet Saturn Star Space

Find an artist for this

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

Pass me that lamp and mind the hatch, my knees have opinions about ladders these days. You want to hear about the jar. Every man aboard the Marigold kept one thing he would not sell in Valparaiso, and for old Tobias Penrose it was a glass preserving jar with a tin lid, and on the label, in pencil he sharpened with his teeth, two words: FAR AWAY.

Keep reading

He caught the sky in it off the Horn. Middle watch, the stars so thick over the swell you'd think someone had stippled the whole dark with a fine brush. Hollis, our second mate, a Bristol lad who never shut up about his mother's pies, bet him a month's rum that no man alive could keep a galaxy in a jar. Tobias only grunted, unscrewed the lid, and held it up to the heavens like he was taking a sample of weather.

The jar went quiet after that, the way a full thing does. Tobias swore there was a ringed planet in it, a spiral of stars turning slow as a mill wheel, and a little grey world no bigger than a marble that had been waiting for him since he was a boy. When the fever took Hollis in the Pacific and he began asking for his mother's kitchen, Tobias pressed the jar into his hands. Hollis unscrewed the lid in the dark, and I heard him laugh once, soft, before he went still.

See that faint turning light off the port bow? Some nights I swear it's the sky itself, spilling slowly back out over the water, getting home to where it belongs.