Colourful abstract planet tattoo with splatter and dotwork on an upper arm and forearm, crossed by teal and purple diagonal lines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Planet and splatter sleeve with diagonal lines

Dotwork · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A coloured planet or moon sits on the upper arm, surrounded by watercolour-style splashes in teal, yellow, orange and purple. Fine dotwork speckles drift down the forearm, and two long teal and purple diagonal lines run the length of the arm. The photo shows the arm against a white polka-dot top, with the colour clearly dominating the composition.

Dotwork Upper arm Forearm Planet Galaxy Splatter Dot Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass tube was still warm from Mr Ashby's hands when he gave it to me on the Tuesday, the lens inside cracked along one edge like a hairline on a teacup. I was sixteen and mostly good for hauling things up the hill to the observatory above Scarrow Lane, which was really a tin shed with a roof that stuck every time it rained.

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That night the sky over the mill chimneys cleared to the colour of cold tea, and Mr Ashby let me take the first look. The planet filled the eyepiece like something spilt. Teal and orange ran across it in wet sheets, with a purple bloom at its rim, and all around it grit drifted down through the dark in tiny dots, as if someone had shaken pepper over the whole sky. He had strung two fine wires across the field the summer before, one teal thread and one purple, so he could measure how far the thing crept each night. They ran down the glass and off the edge of the world, and he tapped them with a fingernail as though they might hum.

The council wanted the shed for a bus depot by spring, and Mr Ashby had stopped eating his dinner properly. On the last clear night he sat with his back to the door and told me to plot the wires myself. I drew them on the back of a rent book, one line sloping down to the left, one to the right, and where they crossed I marked a small round circle the size of a shilling.

He never looked through the eyepiece again. I took the rent book home and pinned it above my bed, and whenever the sky goes that particular dark blue I lie awake counting dots, waiting for the two lines to meet somewhere I can reach.