Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a mason jar filled with planets and stars, with a label reading FAR AWAY, on the forearm.

Mason jar galaxy with FAR AWAY label

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A mason jar with a screw-top lid sits at the centre of the design, filled with a night sky of stippled stars, a ringed planet resembling Saturn, a spiral galaxy and smaller planets. A paper label across the middle of the jar reads FAR AWAY in capital letters. The shading is built from dense dots and fine lines in black and grey, and the jar is outlined with a clean edge against the lighter skin of the forearm.

Dotwork Forearm Galaxy Planet Saturn Star Space Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags found the jar on the lamp-room sill the morning after the gale, its lid stiff with salt and its paper label curling at one corner. Her uncle Tobias had written FAR AWAY across it in carpenter's pencil, the way he labelled everything he couldn't bear to throw out. Inside, where the sea should have been, there was only dark, dusted with light.

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"You'll not open it in the wind," he said from the stairs, breathing hard. He had climbed the spiral to check the lens after the storm and was still counting steps under his breath. She told him she had no intention of opening anything. She held the jar up to the grey window. A ringed planet hung near the glass, a spiral of stars turned slowly like a wheel of milk, and something small and pale rolled past the edge of the paper.

"That's the winter of the blackout," he said. "I was twenty-two and too stubborn to come down. I unscrewed the lid on the gallery and the sky went in on its own, the way water runs into a bucket. Took three nights to fill it." He took the jar from her and turned it, and she saw the stars shift as if they had heard him.

"Why keep it?" she asked. He set it back on the sill where the lamp would find it at dusk. "So when the light goes round I know where the far places are." Then he reached for the switch, and the beam swept across the water and the glass together, and for one long second the sky in the jar was the brightest thing on the headland.