Realistic colour sleeve tattoo of a nebula, drifting asteroids, a blue ringed planet and a ripple on an arm, running from shoulder to wrist.

Space sleeve with nebula and planets

Realism · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A full arm sleeve shows outer space, with a glowing orange and pink nebula and dark asteroids on the upper arm, a blue planet with a ripple effect on the forearm, and a red sphere and a blue mountain-like planet near the wrist. The shading is smooth and photographic, with strong highlights and soft gradients across the skin. The tattoo fills most of the frame against a white t-shirt and a mirrored background.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Space Nebula Planet Galaxy Sphere Mountain

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

The back bedroom at Salt Quay House had a ceiling like a bruise, damp in the corners, and by February I had decided to paint it black. Mrs Pruett, who owned the place and had not been up a ladder since the Coronation, said I could have the paint if I stopped asking her about her knees.

Keep reading

I started with the nebula because it was easy to be wrong about. Orange at the edges where the light came in from the harbour, pink where the wet plaster took the colour badly and I had to cover it twice. Dad had described that sky to me from the bridge of the Corinna, somewhere past the Azores, when the stars came so thick he said you could read the shipping notices by them. Nobody believed him about the reading. I put a few rocks in too, dark and lumpy, drifting past like unpaid bills.

By the third week I was on the stepladder with a fine brush, halfway through a small blue world, when a guest knocked about the boiler. I went down to find the boiler was fine and only the pilot had gone out. When I climbed back up, the blue planet had a ripple across it that I had not meant. Water, I thought. I had been listening to the sea all month through the window, and my hand had put it there.

Mrs Pruett came up at six with a flask and stood under the ceiling for a long time. She said the room looked like a cold place to sleep. I told her it was the one room in Hastings where you could see the whole way out. She didn't answer, just poured the tea into the cup with no handle and left me the flask. I left the ripple as it was.