Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull with a galaxy in the cranium

Realism · Other · Mixed · Photo

A side-profile human skull with the cranium filled by a glowing galaxy of teal, violet and purple swirls, scattered white stars and a bright four-pointed star. The skull is shaded in soft greys with fine detail on the teeth and jaw, while the galaxy is rendered in colour with smooth blends. Two close-up photographs show the same piece from slightly different angles, with another dark tattoo partly visible at the bottom of the frame.

Realism Neo-trad Other Skull Galaxy Nebula Star Space

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Oswin the juggler had been blind to daylight since the autumn the circus failed, but he could still tell the hour by the sky he carried behind his brow. His mother said a fever had opened him up when he was six and let the night in. The stars wheeled round in there like horses in a ring, and on cold nights a little of their light leaked out at the temple.

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Calloway's had played the market towns for forty years, but by the last week of October the tent had more holes than canvas and the bears had gone to a zoo in Leeds. Hale, the man who held the paper on the wagons, came to the field with his ledgers under his arm. He offered to cancel the debt if Oswin would show the sky to the crowd on the final night. Oswin said the sky was not a thing to sell. Hale said everything was a thing to sell, and that was the trouble with the century.

On the last night the lamps were turned low and the people sat in their coats on the bleachers. Oswin walked to the centre of the sawdust, took off his hat and lifted his face. A white star dropped from above his eye and crossed the tent poles like a thrown coin. Then the whole canvas turned teal and violet, the colour of the northern lights before frost, and a pale road of cloud ran from one side of the big top to the other. Nobody spoke. A child in the front row began to cry for the sky to go home.

In the morning the wagons were still in the field, but the purse on the ringmaster's table was heavy with coins nobody remembered paying, and Hale's ledgers had blank pages where the debts had been. Oswin was gone. Some say he walked north with the stars in his head. Others say he is still in the ring, keeping time for a show that never ends. The field is ploughed now, but the frost comes early over that corner, and the stars are out long before dusk.