Watercolour and ink tattoo design of a red-haired figure with lightning bolt face paint, surrounded by rockets, planets, a crystal and a sun with leaves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red-haired figure with rockets and planets flash

Colour · Flash

A stylised bust of a red-haired figure with closed eyes and a lightning bolt across the face sits within an oval frame. Surrounding it are two rockets, ringed and cratered planets, a purple crystal, stars, comets, pink lightning bolts and a sun with laurel sprigs below. Thin ink outlines are combined with loose watercolour washes in red, yellow, pink, purple and green on a pale background.

Figure Rocket Planet Star Crystal Lightning bolt Sun Laurel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fiddler at the Lantern Hall in Muckle Tarrow had played the same three reels for forty years, so when the stranger walked in with a tin rocket under one arm, nobody looked up until he began to tune a guitar the colour of a wet sunset. Old Mrs Pennock said he had come down the Milky Way on a Tuesday, which was the only day the hall let strangers in.

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He asked for the floor at midnight. The caretaker, Dessie Galt, said the floor belonged to the Hallowe'en committee and the committee had gone home. The stranger only smiled, drew a pink lightning bolt across his cheek with a fingertip of paint, and played a note so high that the chandeliers hummed back at him. Every planet painted on the ceiling began to turn on its nail.

Then the dancing started. Dessie danced with the coat rack. Mrs Pennock took off her shoes and danced like she was seventeen again. The rockets in the car park woke up with orange tails, and the ringed planet slid down the wall and waltzed with the crystal chandelier until the glass sang a hymn nobody had heard since the mill closed.

By dawn the stranger was gone, leaving only the tin rocket and a gold ring on the bar counter. The village still says that if you dance at the Lantern Hall on a Tuesday, you will wake with a red streak in your hair and a comet's worth of stories you cannot quite remember telling.