Symmetrical horned helmet design on a white background, with its shapes filled by a green and brown galaxy of stars and nebula.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Horned helmet with galaxy fill

Colour · Flash

A symmetrical design of a horned helmet with a pointed, curved horn on each side and a central crest. The shapes are cut out as bold black outlines and filled with a starry galaxy pattern in green, yellow and brown. The design sits centred on a plain white background.

Helmet Horn Galaxy Nebula Star Space

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fleet came in past the breakwater a little after four, the gulls already quarrelling over the first offcuts, and I stood at the rail counting boats the way my father taught me. Eleven. Twelve with the Morag Rose limping at the back. Nobody had a hold worth the diesel, but nobody had lost a man either, and in February that is most of what a skipper hopes for.

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That night, out past the Stroma light, I had the first watch alone with the helmet. It was not a real helmet, really. My grandfather had beaten it out of boiler plate in a shed on Gill Street and welded two horns onto the crown, a joke for the lads at the yard, and it hung in the wheelhouse on a nail above the radar. Somewhere past midnight the cloud tore open and the sky went deep green and gold over the water, a whole nebula spilling down behind the horns, and I swear the steel took the light and held it, like it had been waiting for someone to notice.

I radioed Dougie on the Morag Rose to come and look. He said, "You've been at the flask again," and then he came up anyway, and for ten minutes we stood in the wheelhouse with our faces lit like children while the sea slapped the hull and the nets came up empty and wet. Dougie didn't say much. He touched one horn with a knuckle and said his mother would have wanted a photograph, though she never once in her life owned a camera.

In the morning I took the helmet down and wrapped it in a sail bag, the way things get stored on a boat that means to last. But when we tied up, the sky over the harbour was still green at the edges, so I hung it back on its nail and left the wheelhouse door open for the air.