Colour realism tattoo of four planets stacked along a forearm against a blue and red nebula with scattered stars.

Planets and nebula on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm tattoo shows four planets stacked from elbow towards wrist: a blue and green Earth-like world with cloud cover, a cratered orange-brown body, a red planet, and a small turquoise sphere near the wrist. The planets are shaded with soft gradients and fine surface detail, set against a background of teal, blue and red nebula clouds and small white stars. Colour ink dominates the piece, and the composition runs the length of the arm.

Realism Forearm Planet Earth Moon Nebula Star Galaxy Space

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mother Gorse kept the planet cloth folded in a tea chest under the big wheel, and she would not let anyone unfold it before dark. The fair had been on the common outside Thetford for nine days when the boy from the cattle lorries came asking for the Earth. He had money in a paper twist and wanted to see the blue one, with the weather on it.

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She took him behind the dodgems, where the generator hummed, and lifted the cloth. It was painted on linen, four worlds stacked one above another like apples in a crate, with a red sky running down the bottom edge where the nebula had bled into the weave. Earth wore its cloud the way a farmer wears a cap. Below it the moon was pocked and sandy, then the red one, and last a small turquoise ball that the old painter had said was sleeping.

The boy asked why the paint looked so wet. She told him the painter had spent a winter on the coast, grinding his pigment with sea water, and that every night he had laid the cloth on the sand so the stars would come out in it. Then she said the painter had run off with a juggler and left the bottom planet unfinished, which was why the turquoise one had no name.

The boy gave her the twist of money and asked what it was called. She rolled the cloth back into the chest. "Whatever you're looking at when you're tired," she said, and went to light the lamps on the wheel.