Colour tattoo of a full moon above a dark pine forest and a starry purple and teal sky, covering the shoulder and upper arm.

Night sky, moon and pine forest on upper arm

Realism · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a large moon with grey shading and a warm orange glow, set against a starry night sky with purple and teal nebula-like clouds. Tall black pine trees rise from the bottom of the design, with fainter grey trees receding behind them. Soft blended shading and sharp dark silhouettes create depth, and the sky and forest run across the shoulder onto the upper arm.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Moon Pine tree Forest Night sky Star Galaxy Nebula

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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

Hold your tea and mind the guy rope, because the lamps are going out one by one and the moon still hasn't decided whether to come up over the pines. Right, then. Sit close. My grandmother ran the big wheel at Harrowgate Fair the autumn the night sky came loose from its nails, and she always swore the sky was never meant to be purple and green like a bruise that had learned to shine.

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The moon had come down that week, rolling low over the spruce behind the fence line, and it snagged in the highest branches like a balloon off a child's wrist. Every grown man at the fair tried to fetch it with a broom handle and got nothing but pine needles down his collar. So the ghost-train lad, Eli Penhallow, who was eleven and had no fear of anything except his mother's slipper, shinned up the trunk in his socks. The black trees rose under him like a staircase made of smoke, and the stars were thick as sugar in the cloth above.

He got to the moon. It was cool and grey and pocked like a cold pudding, and it would not budge. Eli could have wept, but instead he reached past it and pinched one small star from the dark, the way you'd pinch a spark from a bonfire. He dropped it into his tin whistle case and climbed down with the whole sky clinking in his pocket.

And if you walk the fence line at Harrowgate tonight, you'll see the moon hanging over the trees, still rimmed orange where his fingers touched it. Mind the rope now. Off you go.