Colour tattoo of a space scene with a pink and blue nebula, ringed planets and a bright starburst across the inner forearm.

Space nebula and planets on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo covers the inner forearm with a space scene containing ringed and cratered planets, a bright starburst and scattered stars. The shading is soft and blended, with airbrush-like gradients, and the nebula moves from pink and red at the top through purple and blue to teal lower down. Colour ink dominates the composition, which is framed by the skin of the arm and wrist.

Forearm Space Nebula Planet Star Starburst Galaxy Moon

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pink went on first, because Dad said the sky always starts hot and cools as you climb. He worked down from the top of the gable with the airbrush hissing like a kettle while I held the tin of cobalt and the rag, and the High Street emptied around us for teatime. Mrs Tully from the post office stopped to ask if we were painting the Coronation again. Dad said no, the far side of the moon, for the Ashby Dramatic Society, and she laughed as though he'd made a joke.

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It was the week after the Russians sent their bleeping ball over the rooftops, and every shop in Ashby wanted something up there. Pritchard's wanted a rocket. The chemist wanted a Sputnik in the window. Dad wanted stars that were actually stars, with dark dust lanes and a bright white burst where one was being born. He had spent three nights in the reading room copying plates from a library book with a green cloth cover, and he came home with his fingers stained the colour of the book.

The planets were the trouble. He did the ringed one first, then a cratered one tucked low on the left, its edge lit with a thin glow. I asked why the blue-green one at the bottom had to be curved like that, and he said it wasn't Earth, it was somewhere else, somewhere a boy could go if he had a mind to. Then he went quiet and dabbed at the teal with the rag for longer than it needed.

His hand shook on the last star, so it came out crooked, a little kicked-up thing near the edge. He said nobody would notice from the road. That night I lay awake and watched the wall glow faintly under the lamp across the street, and I counted the crooked star as ours.