Colourful realistic galaxy tattoo with planets and drifting asteroids across a shoulder blade, shown beside an earlier outlined tribal design on the left.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Galaxy with planets and asteroids on a shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

The right panel shows a large galaxy scene across the shoulder blade, with two shaded planets, a small red planet, drifting asteroids and a nebula of purple, orange and blue. The planets use smooth blended shading and highlights, with fine specks for stars. The left panel shows a black tribal-style motif inside purple circle outlines on the same area of skin, with a dark strap across the lower frame.

Realism Shoulder Back Galaxy Planet Nebula Star Tribal Circle Space

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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

Sit closer, the wind up here has teeth, and these old walls will swallow your voice if you let them. You want the story of Mother Hesketh and the stone that fell out of the sky? Then mind the gap in the floor where the stairs used to be.

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She kept the observatory in the north tower of Carrickmore, back when the roof still held. Every night she climbed with a lamp in one hand and a copper bowl of mercury in the other, because the mercury showed her the stars twice, once above and once below, and she trusted the one below more. One January she saw a stone the size of a cart wheel come sliding out of the dark, dragging a tail of orange light, and it passed so low over the moor that the sheep bolted into the bog.

It did not burn out. It lodged itself in the bank of the Lanty, and for a week the villagers came with chisels to chip pieces from it, black and glittering, and every shard they carried home they wrapped in cloth and hid beneath their beds. Hesketh took only one piece. She set it in a silver ring and wore it on the hand she used to steady the telescope, and some nights, the old tellers say, the ring glowed blue as the mercury did.

In spring the pale planets rose over the keep, and when she looked into the bowl she counted one moon too many. Three small worlds hung there, one of them red as a coal, and drifting past them were grey splinters of rock she knew by their shape. She pulled the ring from her finger and let it drop into the mercury. The bowl went still, and the stone went back up to join them. Mind your footing on the way down.