Full back tattoo of planets and spiral galaxies seen through a torn, laced opening in the skin, in bright colour.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Galaxy scene torn open across a back

Back · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a night sky with a ringed planet, a banded planet, a spiral galaxy, a comet and a glowing nebula, framed by a jagged opening in the skin that is bound with crossed laces. Shading is soft and blended, with bright blues, purples, greens and yellows against dark edges around the tear. The design covers the whole back and narrows to a thin laced strip running down the spine.

Back Galaxy Planet Nebula Star Space Lace Torn skin Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Sputnik beep came over the wireless in October, and by the next Tuesday the sky above Harrowgate Fen had split along the Milky Way like a seam that had finally given way. You were at the kitchen table with a bobbin in one hand when Mrs Pell hammered on the door, shouting that the stars were coming through.

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Out on the allotments the tear hung wide as a barn door, its edges furred black like scorched cloth. Through the gap you could see a ringed planet turning slow as a potter's wheel, a banded one beside it, a spiral galaxy wound up tight as a clock spring, and something green and gold breathing where the nebula bled out. Mr Hadley had already dragged his ladder onto the chapel path. He said somebody had to lace it shut before the lot came down on the roof.

You knew the knot. Your mother taught you on her stays and boot laces: cross, pull, cross again, and never tie off on the same side twice. So you climbed with a hank of waxed cord from the mill and threaded it through the torn edges while a comet went over, a bright splinter sliding east towards Peterborough. Each crossing drew the dark a little closer. The planets stopped spinning in their slots, and the stars held still.

By dawn the sky was whole again, though a thin lattice of gold ran from the zenith down to the spire, and the village kept looking up at it over its tea. Mr Hadley says it is only a repair. You think it is a stitch in something that wanted to be opened, and on nights when the wind comes off the fen you swear the lacing has slipped a notch.