Black and grey tattoo of a rocket launching through smoke inside a circle with planets and stars, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rocket launch in a circle on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A rocket lifts off on a diagonal, trailing billowing smoke clouds, enclosed within a circular frame. Ringed and cratered planets and small dots suggest a night sky. The fine hatched and stippled linework gives the scene an engraved, woodcut-like texture, shaded in black and grey against pale skin.

Forearm Rocket Smoke Planet Saturn Moon Star Space Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had been coming down on the Saturday market since seven, and Ada Pryce had given up on her bread stall and was trying to keep a wooden block dry under her coat. It was a printing block, pear wood, the size of a dinner plate, with a round moon cut into it years ago, its craters gouged so deep the ink would catch in them like pockets. She had bought it from a house clearance in Bolton for two shillings and a promise to return the box of chisels too.

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The boy came to the stall just after the church clock struck twelve, soaked to the knees, asking whether she had anything about rockets. He had a school notebook with a rocket drawn in biro on the cover, the corner crumpled where he had kept it in his pocket. She told him she had only old almanacs and a tin of lino offcuts, but he looked so crestfallen that she pulled out the pear block and turned it toward the light.

"Somebody carved this for a launch," she said. "See how the lines all run the same way, like rain down a window."

He traced the moon with one finger. "Who was it for?"

She didn't know, and said so. They spent the rest of the hour inking the block from her jar of printer's ink and pressing sheets of brown paper onto it with the heel of her hand, until the boy had a smudged circle with a rocket climbing through it, trailing a column of puffed cloud that the rain softened at the edges. He took the print home folded inside his notebook. Ada kept the block, which she never sold.