Full-colour realism tattoo on an upper arm and shoulder showing a girl on a swing under a starry sky above a planet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Girl on a swing above a starry planet on the arm

Realism · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a girl with long hair, seen from behind, sitting on a swing with chains rising out of the top of the frame. She sits beneath a dense night sky filled with stars and a glowing band of light, with a curved planet below her in blues, greens and ochre landmasses. Smooth, detailed shading and blended colour run across the whole piece, which wraps over the shoulder and upper arm.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Girl Chain Star Night sky Planet Earth Galaxy

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chain had gone the colour of weak tea by the time Dilys decided it would hold one more summer. She said so to Owen, who was already halfway up the rope ladder she had nailed to the ash, and he laughed at her and kicked off from the trunk anyway. The swing hung from the last branch above the parish, where the lane gave up and the wall of the sheep field began. From the seat you could see nothing but sky, and then, if you leaned back far enough, the whole round shoulder of the world.

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Dilys had first come up here as a girl, in the year the mill closed and her father stopped talking at supper. She had never told anyone what she saw from the top of the arc, only that the stars came so close they seemed to brush the hair on her forehead. Owen wanted facts. He wanted to know how far off the bright band was, and whether the blue below was sea or cloud. She told him she did not know, and that not knowing was the best part of a swing.

On the last evening of August he pushed higher than he had ever gone, legs straight, the chains singing against the bough. Dilys stood at the wall with her cardigan pulled tight and watched him tip backwards into the dark. For one long moment he hung there, a small shape against the Milky Way, and she saw him lift one hand as if he meant to touch the ochre land far below.

He came down laughing, cheeks raw from the wind, and asked her what lay over the hill. She took the rope from him, wiped the dew off the seat with her sleeve, and sat. Then she pushed off and let the chain carry her up towards the stars.