Three views of a full arm sleeve tattoo showing a colourful nebula, planets and stars in a realistic style on the upper arm and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Nebula and planets full arm sleeve

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The sleeve depicts outer space, with glowing orange and red planets, scattered white stars and clouds of nebula gas across the arm. The shading is soft and blended, with smooth gradients between yellow, green, pink and blue tones. The three photographs show the sleeve from front, side and back, with the design wrapping around the whole arm.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Space Nebula Planet Star Galaxy Sleeve

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

The big top had not been properly dark since 1974, so when Dad handed me a bucket of ultramarine and a sponge at the top of the ladder, I assumed he was joking. The canvas was the colour of stewed tea and sagged where the king pole had cracked in Doncaster. "Paint us a sky," he said. "Nobody watches the clowns if the roof is lovely."

Keep reading

It took nine days. Orange first, for the planet, which Dad insisted on, a sulking Mars hung over the trapeze rigging. Then the gas clouds, green and rose, rubbed in with a rag and a bit of spit, pale yellow wherever the work lamp caught them. Mrs Okonedo from wardrobe held the lamp and sang hymns she only half remembered. The stars I flicked from an old toothbrush, hundreds of them, until my knuckles were blue to the second joint. Each evening we lit the ring below, and the crowd, paying their two quid, tipped their heads back and forgot their toffee apples.

The show folded in Ludlow in November. A farmer called Gwyn Pritchard bought the tent for the roof of a new cattle barn, and I went to watch him unroll it in the mud. He hung it sky side down, so the stars faced the hay bales and the painted gas drifted over the water trough.

Every winter since, a dozen Herefords have chewed their way through the dark under a sky nobody else on earth has seen, and the orange planet hangs over them, sulking, as bright as ever.