Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a glass jar holding a galaxy with planets and stars, placed on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Galaxy jar with planets on a lower leg

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a jar with a dark lid and rim, enclosing a swirling galaxy with purple, pink and orange nebula clouds. A teal ringed planet, a smaller orange planet, a grey moon and scattered stars sit inside the glass. Bold black outlines and soft shading give the glass a rounded, dimensional look, and a gloved hand holds the skin at the right edge of the frame.

Neo-trad Calf Jar Galaxy Planet Star Space Moon Nebula

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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 have the jar in your hand before the lorry driver has finished his sentence about the hold-up at the roundabout. It is heavier than a jar of jam should be, and when you tilt it toward the strip light above the booth, something inside turns over slowly, like cream being stirred. The declaration form says preserves, domestic. The lid is dark and cold and the glass has a thick rounded shoulder that catches your thumb.

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You hold it up to the window. Inside, a galaxy has been packed in tight, all violet and rose and a fire-coloured orange that glows at the bottom edge. A teal ring sits round a small planet like a hoop round a finger. A grey moon bobs near the rim, pocked and patient, and a scatter of stars drifts in the dark between them. Nobody in the queue behind him is watching you. Your supervisor is watching the clock, and the clock says twenty to four, and the sky in the jar does not care what time it is.

He says his nan made it in a village that has no name on the map any more, that the stars were always too close to the ground there and somebody had to catch some. He says it so flatly that you almost believe him, and that is the trouble with the job. You have stamped plenty of things that were not what they declared. You have never stamped a sky.

In the end you write nothing-to-declare on the slip, press the rubber stamp down hard, and hand the jar back with both hands, the way you would return something warm. He tucks it into his coat. Through the open flap you see the orange planet slide to the edge of the glass and settle again, and you keep watching the faint swirl of the nebula long after the car has pulled away past the barrier.