Realistic colour tattoo of four planets stacked down a forearm over a teal, red and blue nebula.

Planets and nebula on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm tattoo shows four planets in a vertical line, with an Earth-like sphere at the top, followed by a cratered orange-tan world, a red planet and a small blue planet at the bottom. The planets are shaded with smooth gradients and surface detail, and small white stars are scattered across a background of teal, red and deep blue nebula clouds. The colour is vivid and dominant, and the composition follows the curve of the arm from elbow to wrist.

Realism Forearm Planet Space Galaxy Nebula Star Earth Moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Harrow Point has been out since March, so you take the stairs, all twenty-two floors, counting landings by the smell of different dinners. Mrs Okafor on eleven keeps her door propped for the draught and calls out that the sky is clear tonight, which means you will be wanted on the roof.

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On the roof the wind works at your coat. Gary from flat seven has set up the brass telescope his father left him, pointed past the bus depot toward the reservoir. Taped to the door of the stair housing is a sheet of paper with the planets drawn in biro, one above another: a blue-green ball at the top, then a pitted orange one, a red one, and a small blue dot at the bottom that he insists on calling Neptune though he cannot agree with anyone about the spelling. "Like a bus queue," he says. You tell him the order runs outward from the Sun, and he says the Sun is not in the queue, the Sun is the driver.

You take turns at the eyepiece. Mars is a rusted coin low over the cranes. The Moon is so bright it stings, and Gary names its craters after football clubs his grandad used to support. Below, the estate hums: a radio, a dog, someone shouting a child in for bed. Nobody else looks up. The sodium lamps turn the whole sky the colour of the inside of a peach.

When the cold gets into your fingers, Gary folds the paper into his pocket and says he will draw the bottom one better next time. You go down in the dark with one hand on the rail. At the eighth-floor landing you stop at the window and find the roof's small light still burning above you, the last planet in the column, and you climb on towards it.