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

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Galaxy jar with Far Away label on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A glass jar with a screw-top lid holds a dotwork night sky containing a ringed planet, a spiral galaxy, a moon-like sphere and scattered stars. A paper label across the centre reads FAR AWAY in capital letters. The jar is outlined in solid black linework, and the space inside is shaded with stippled dots in black and grey.

Dotwork Forearm Jar Galaxy Planet Saturn Star Space Moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit close, because the jar is the whole of it, and you'll want to see it with your own eyes before I'm done. Old Tobias Quill kept it on the sill of the lamp room for forty winters, a Kilner with a rusted screw top. Into it went the night sky, a bit at a time. A ringed planet he fished out of the wake one foggy October, a spiral of stars that had drifted too near the Teeth, and a pale moon the size of a pearl button.

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The label was his own work, FAR AWAY in block capitals, pasted across the middle so the stars showed through the gaps. His wife Maud had gone across to the mainland to nurse her sister and had never come back to the rock. Each evening he'd wind the lamp, lift the jar to the glass, and tell the gulls, 'She's far away, mind, but the sky's not so big as all that.' Then he'd give it a shake and watch the dust go round.

One spring a boy from the supply boat called Jem came up the steps with the post and asked what was in the jar. Tobias told him it was everything that had ever been lost at sea and never found. Jem pressed his nose to the glass and said he could see a light in it, a small yellow one, which was nonsense, because Maud's lamp was on the mainland. But the old man went quiet, and then he unscrewed the lid for the first time in years.

The stars rose out of the jar like smoke and went up through the lamp room roof, one after another, until the sky was only sky again. Tobias set the empty jar on the sill and the label curled and fell away. Far across the water, a small yellow light blinked back at the rock, twice, the way it always had.