Three views of a full arm sleeve on the upper arm, showing a space scene with an orange nebula, pale moons, dark asteroids and a comet in blue and purple.

Space scene sleeve on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo covers the upper arm with a space scene: a glowing orange nebula at the top, several pale cream moons or planets, and dark clustered asteroids. A comet with a pale tail streaks diagonally across the lower arm, and the background is shaded in blue, teal and purple. Soft blended shading gives the clouds a painterly, cosmic look, and the three panels show the sleeve from the front, side and back.

Upper arm Space Nebula Moon Planet Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp man had already dimmed the sawdust lights when Nell saw the comet, a pale smear dragging itself across the Herefordshire hedges. She thought at first it was a flare from the fair on the far side of the lane. Then the drummer boy stopped mid-roll and pointed, and eleven people in the stands turned their faces up through the vent in the canvas, and nobody looked at the ring at all.

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Vernon had sold the last grey pony at dawn to pay for diesel, and the show was down to four acts, two of them run by people who had never worked a rope before the spring. Nell climbed the rigging anyway with her chalk bag tied at her hip, the cold metal rungs stinging her palms. Her cue was the band's sad waltz. Below her the bandleader was looking at the sky, and the waltz kept going on its own, slower and slower, like a record left on the turntable.

She could hear Vernon bellowing from the ring, telling everyone to keep their eyes on the girl on the bar. Nell thought about the net, which had been patched with fishing cord, and about the drop, and about how the comet would not wait for anyone to finish their sums. She let go of the bar at the top of the swing, and for one long second she was only a body moving between the stars painted on the tent poles.

Afterwards the takings were still in the biscuit tin, because nobody had thought to collect them. Nell sat on the step of the caravan with her hands in her lap and watched the tail fade over the stubble fields, while the crowd wandered off into the dark with their faces still tilted up, and the sky, for once, had the only applause she needed.