Woman with purple hair seen from behind, standing in sea spray, with a colourful cosmic tattoo of planets and swirling shapes across her back and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Galaxy tattoo on a back in the sea

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A woman with long purple hair stands in breaking waves with her back to the camera. A large colourful tattoo across her shoulder and back shows swirling cosmic forms, planets and teal and purple nebula-like shading, with a second darker design visible lower down. The grey sky and churning sea fill the background, and the soft focus on the water gives the scene a dreamy feel.

Back Galaxy Planet Nebula Swirl Sea Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Force five from the west and the glass still falling, so we ran for the lee of the Holm with the nets half hauled. Mum would have had the kettle on by now. Instead I am writing this in the wheelhouse with the chart weighted down by the thermos, while Danny sleeps on the fish boxes with his boots still on.

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Something happened off the Skerry around two. The cloud tore open the way it does up here, and there was the whole river of the Milky Way laid over us, thick as spilt milk, with the planets sitting in it like brass buttons. Teal light was coming up off the water where the plankton had got going, so the sea looked like it had weather of its own underneath. I stood at the rail with the wheel lashed and felt the boat lift and drop as if she were breathing.

Grandad taught me to find Vega by the way it sat over the pot marker, and I thought of him, of the old chart he kept in a biscuit tin with the planets pencilled in the margin in his square hand. He said the sky was just the sea turned over. I used to think that was daft. Tonight I looked down at the glow swirling in our wake and saw he was right, and the water was full of the same slow spinning worlds.

By four the cloud had closed again and the glass had risen a tenth. We hauled the last string of pots in the grey light and nobody said much. I have pinned the chart above my bunk with a drawing pin through Grandad's pencil marks. Tell your mother the gear is fine and we'll be in on Thursday, with the good crab if the Lord allows.