Colour traditional-style tattoos on an upper arm and forearm, showing a rocket, snowflakes, stars, a mandala and a dark grey animal.

Rocket, snowflakes and mandala on an arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A bent arm, shown from the side, carries a sleeve of tattoos that includes a rocket with a figure beneath it, black snowflakes, small stars and a partial word at the top of the upper arm. A large mandala-style floral motif sits on the forearm near the elbow, with a dark grey animal below it. Bold black outlines and mostly coloured ink in red, green, yellow and pink fill the design, set against a plain white T-shirt sleeve and a softly lit room.

Traditional Upper arm Forearm Rocket Spaceship Snowflake Star Mandala Floral Figure Animal Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The abbot found the rocket on a Tuesday, in the margin of the Lauds psalter, and he held the page up to the lamp as though it might catch fire. I told him Brother Hal swore it had gone over the fells three nights running, a light moving faster than any star has a right to.

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Brother Hal was nineteen and had come to us from a Leeds rectory with a wireless he was not supposed to own. He had drawn the rocket himself, a red and yellow spindle with a tiny figure tumbling beneath it on a tether of ink, and around it a scatter of black snowflakes, the six-armed kind Brother Cuthbert used to cut from paper for the infirmary windows. Cuthbert had painted the mandala on that same page forty years before, a lotus of petals opening in ochre and rose around the initial letter, and the boy had sent his rocket straight up through the middle of it, as if the flower had fired it.

The abbot wanted the page scraped. The vellum was older than the house, he said, and the ink would not lift without taking the skin with it. I thought of Cuthbert, who lay in the infirmary now, asking each morning whether the snow had reached the lower wall yet.

That evening I took my pen and drew a second trail, thin and silver, from the rocket's tail down to the edge of the page, where it curled around the word for mercy. I left the snowflakes and the little star alone. In the morning the abbot found the psalter on his desk, open at Lauds, and he did not mention it again, though he kept it open there for the rest of that winter.