Black ink blackwork tattoo of an astronaut helmet, a skull and a ringed planet stacked down the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Helmet, skull and planet on a thigh

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Three separate black line motifs are stacked vertically on the outer thigh: an astronaut helmet at the top, a skull in the middle and a ringed planet below. The bold outlines are filled with solid black and fine parallel hatching, and the helmet visor is stippled with dots. The image is black and white, shot straight on against a dark background with the figure's shorts at the top edge.

Blackwork Dotwork Thigh Skull Planet Space

Find an artist for this

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

Old Mazur kept the helmet in a biscuit tin under the ring-master's caravan, because the big top had been sold for its poles two winters back and nobody wanted to see a man in a glass visor walk into a sawdust ring anymore. The circus had one act left that paid: the Rocket Man, who was really a boy called Tomasz from the Ashby depot, strapped into a tin capsule that rolled down a ramp and bounced off a painted moon. Everyone agreed the moon was the best part.

Keep reading

Then the rain came for three weeks and the field at Leck turned to soup. The owner, a thin woman named Ida Vane, sat in the lorry with the accounts and said the planet had to go. She meant the painted Saturn that hung over the gate, its ring cracked in two places, and the skull on the tent pole that the children had always been frightened of. Tomasz asked what would happen to the rocket. Ida said rockets are only for people who can pay to go up.

So on the last night, Tomasz walked out past the lights with the helmet under his arm and climbed the hill behind the field to the old quarry. He set the helmet on a flat stone, then the skull beside it, then the little ringed planet he had carved from a cotton reel. Below, the caravans went dark one by one. He waited for something to happen. Nothing did, except the wind, and a single kestrel that hung over the quarry as if it were checking the sums.

The next morning the lorry was gone, and so was the helmet. Ida's accounts had a line in them that said received, one moon, paid in full, which nobody could explain. Tomasz swore for years that the sky over Leck was a shade darker on cold nights, and that a fellow in a silver visor waved from it.