Colour realism tattoo of a glowing nebula in orange, red, blue and purple across the side ribs, with a short line of script beneath it.

Nebula tattoo on the side ribs

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A colourful nebula is tattooed across the side of the ribcage, with soft orange, red, yellow, blue and purple clouds and dark shadowed areas. The shading blends smoothly between tones, giving a painterly, photographic effect. A printed nebula photograph is shown overlaid at the top right as a reference.

Realism Ribs Nebula Space Cloud Script

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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 tin came up the tower on a Tuesday, wrapped in a tea towel that had once been white, and the boy who carried it up the ninety-one steps would not say who had sent it. I set it on the chart table beside the logbook and did not open it until the lamp had been wound and the first grey light was turning over the water like a slow wheel.

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Inside were a dozen sheets of tracing paper, each one blotted with thin watercolour. Orange bled into rust at the edges. Somebody had tried to paint the thing I look at every clear night from the gallery rail, the great smoke of gas out past the Shoal, lit from within like a coal turned over with a poker. The top sheet had a single line in the margin in pencil: look for the red one first, it is the one that is still moving.

The letter underneath was short. She wrote that the ink had run in the rain on the Lowestoft ferry and she had not had the heart to start again. She wrote that her sky did not look like the photograph in the book, and that was the point, because the photograph was of somewhere that had already burned itself out, while the one over the Shoal was still being made, and nobody had told her whether it was safe to look at for long.

That night I climbed to the gallery with the tracing paper folded inside my jacket and held the sheets up against the dark. The clouds hung exactly where she had put them, blue-black, then gold, then a red so deep it was nearly brown. I left the beam off the Shoal a few seconds longer than the Board of Trade would have liked, so that whoever was out there could see the colours too.