Full sleeve tattoo of a colourful space scene with a ringed planet, cratered moons, stars and a nebula on a man's arm, in a realistic style.

Space scene full sleeve tattoo

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A full arm sleeve shows a night sky filled with stars and nebula clouds, with a large cratered planet, a ringed planet resembling Saturn, and rocky asteroids. The lower part of the sleeve shifts to a glowing landscape with a lone tree and a hazy horizon. The shading is smooth and realistic, with bright blues, purples, pinks and oranges against the dark background.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Space Planet Saturn Star Nebula Moon Landscape Tree Sky

Find an artist for this

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

Hush now, and mind the lift, it sulks between the eleventh and twelfth floors. Your great-aunt Maeve lived at the top of Ferndale House for forty years, in a flat that smelled of Vim and cold toast, and every clear night she carried a brass telescope out onto the balcony, wrapped in a tea towel as if it might catch a chill.

Keep reading

The scope had come from a jumble sale in Salford, and its eyepiece was yellowed with thumbprints and fag smoke from a husband nobody talked about. Maeve didn't care. She wanted Saturn, and she wanted it before the cooling towers swallowed it. Down below, the car park lights buzzed orange, the canal lay black as a bin bag, and on the waste ground a lone hawthorn stood on its own, bent by the wind, the only thing for miles that had grown without anybody asking it to.

One February the lift died for good, and her son Dennis had to haul the scope up fourteen flights on his back, swearing at every landing. He found her not at the eyepiece but at the railing, looking down at that hawthorn. She told him the rings of Saturn were like gravel somebody had raked tidy, and the big cratered moon looked like a face left out in the rain. Then she pressed the telescope into his hands.

He put his eye to the cold brass, expecting to see his own reflection stare back, as it always did. Instead the sky opened like a door, all dust and blue fire and pink smoke, and for once he didn't look for himself in it at all.