Fine line and watercolour tattoo on the forearm showing a small figure with yellow hair on a curved planet beside a dashed orbit, planets and blue and purple washes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small figure on a curved planet with watercolour sky

Fine line · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small figure with yellow hair lies or sits on a curved, ridged surface beside a long, curling serpent-like shape, with a few small planets and stars above. The linework is thin and mostly black, with a dashed circle framing the scene. Soft blue and purple watercolour washes fill the background and edges, and the composition sits centrally on the forearm.

Fine line Forearm Figure Planet Star Serpent Orbit Sky Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pell had swept the ridge of his planet every morning for eleven years, though it was no bigger than a bakery and the dust never came back. The serpent Maudlin slept along the far curve, a coil of blue-grey that rose and fell with her breathing, and she complained whenever he stepped over her tail. "You count the stars as if they owe you rent," she said. "Sweep, or sit, but do not do both."

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Above them three smaller worlds hung on threads of light, one ringed like a dropped hat, one pocked like a crumpet, one no more than a bead. Pell had visited none of them. He had tried once, by jumping from the highest knuckle of rock with a sack of bread and a borrowed cloak, and had come down exactly where he started, a little more sunburnt and a good deal wiser about the length of his own legs. Maudlin had laughed for a whole evening.

The dashed circle that ran around everything was the thing he had never trusted. Nobody had drawn it, and it did not break. But on the eleventh anniversary of his arrival, when the purple wash of evening crept over the rim, he noticed a gap in the dashes, a place where the line simply stopped, and beyond it a faint smear of sky with no planet in it at all.

He tied the cloak, shook Maudlin awake, and asked her to hold the ridge steady. She looked at the gap for a long time. Then she uncoiled, slow as ink in water, and lifted her head so that her chin rested on the edge of the world. "Go on, then," she said. "Sweep the first one for me." He stepped off, and the blue of the sky took him gently, the way a wet brush takes the paper.