Colourful skull tattoo on an upper arm with a purple, pink and blue nebula and small white stars filling its cranium and the space above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Galaxy skull on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A grey skull sits at the bottom of the design, with its eye sockets and teeth shaded in soft greys. Above it, purple, pink and blue washes spread upwards like smoke or a nebula, dotted with small white stars. The soft, blended edges and the loose composition give the piece a watercolour feel against the skin.

Upper arm Skull Galaxy Nebula Star Smoke

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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

The lamp-keeper of the herring boat Mary Tennant had carried the skull since the Dogger Bank, and nobody aboard liked to say why. Old Ruth Abel kept it wrapped in oilcloth in the forepeak, and when the fog came down thick as wet wool she unwrapped it, set it on the binnacle and let the candle burn inside its brow.

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The smoke that rose from its eye sockets was never ordinary smoke. It climbed in purple ribbons, bruised pink at the edges, and where the ribbons thinned the blue of deep water showed through, with small white points pricking it like salt on a cut. The crew called them the sky's own lamps. Ruth said they were only the drowned keeping count of the crossings, and that a navigator who could read them would never need a chart.

In the winter of the long gale, the mate Tom Gerrity wanted the skull thrown over the side. He said it was bad luck to carry a grinning head north. Ruth said nothing. She lit the candle, opened the oilcloth, and let him watch the smoke drift towards the port bow, where the stars were thickest over the black water. "Follow where it goes," she said, "and not where you're afraid."

They followed it through three nights of sleet until the cloud tore open and the Shetland light showed grey and small on the bow. Gerrity kept the skull in his own bunk after that. When he died, old and in his bed in Lerwick, the candle had long since burned to nothing, but the men who carried his box down the quay swore the stars still glimmered faintly in the wood of the lid.