Colour tattoo of a mason jar holding a galaxy with a swing inside, on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Galaxy in a mason jar with a swing

Colour · Photo

A mason jar with a metal lid sits on the skin, enclosing a swirling galaxy of purple, blue and pink with scattered white stars. A wooden swing hangs from ropes inside the jar, and its outline is drawn in dark, bold linework. The colour is saturated against the pale skin, and the jar fills most of the frame.

Galaxy Nebula Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit still and mind the fire, because this is the part about the jar, and the jar is the part everyone gets wrong. Our Rhodri went down Glynhafod pit at fourteen with a tin bottle of cold tea and a head full of nonsense about the sky. He said the sky was only a hole in the coal's roof, and if you knocked hard enough, the stars would come through and drop like sparks. Nobody believed him. His mam sent him down with a mason jar for his dinner, screw lid and all, because she had no tin left after the strike.

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Three weeks in, the cage stopped at four hundred feet and the men sat on their haunches in the dark, lamps out to save the oil. Rhodri unscrewed the jar and held it up, and the black went soft around it. Inside was the whole Milky Way, swirled purple and blue like a bruise healing, and a little wooden swing hanging from two ropes right in the middle. Nobody saw him climb in. Jack Pritchard swore he saw the swing move, slow as a chapel bell, and the hush went right through the seam.

They got them out that night, all forty-one, though the rescue men never said how. Rhodri came up the shaft clean-faced and grinning, with the jar tucked under his arm and no swing in it. Some say he pushed it out ahead of him. Others say the stars sat on his shoulders all the way to the surface. He kept the jar on the windowsill of the front room until the day he died, and his mam swore that when the wind came off the tip, you could hear the ropes creak.

So when you walk up the lane tonight and the pithead lamps are out, look up. Sometimes there's a swing up there, and somebody's boy is on it, going higher than the wind wants him to, close enough to touch the edge of the jar.