Black silhouette design of a city skyline with the Space Needle at its centre, shown on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Space Needle and city skyline silhouette

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a city skyline with a tall tower topped by a saucer-shaped observation deck at the centre. The buildings are drawn with outlined edges and flat black fill, with no shading or gradients. The design sits alone in the middle of a plain white background.

Skyline City Building Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth had built card cities for the toy shop on Ferry Street for eleven years, and nothing had ever argued with her like the saucer. It sat on its spindle at the centre of the skyline, a disc no wider than her thumbnail on the plan, and every time she glued it the card curled and the rim went lopsided. She tried scoring it, then steaming it over the kettle, then gave up and sent Tomasz out for a cheap plastic lid, which he brought back grinning and which she threw in the bin.

Keep reading

The commission came from a retired ferry engineer called Desmond Pike, who wanted the view from his late sister's kitchen window in a glass case, every block of it in order. He measured the towers against his memory with a tape he kept in his cardigan pocket. "The needle's shorter than that," he said, when she showed him the first proof. "Not by much. But it was always shorter when we were young." She filed the spindle down by a millimetre and he nodded as if she had rescued something.

By the third week the skyline stood in its box, black against white card, every window cut by hand. Desmond asked whether the saucer could glow. She said the battery would show, and he said he did not mind about the battery. So she tucked a coin cell under the base and ran a single wire up the spindle, and on the Friday he came in before opening and switched it on himself.

The light caught the spindle and threw a thin shadow across the counter, straight and fine as a pencil line drawn to a corner of the map. Desmond looked at it for a long time, paid for the case, and carried it out under his arm, unwrapped, as though it might still need the light.