Circular colour tattoo of Van Gogh's The Starry Night on the middle of a person's back, showing swirling blue sky, yellow stars and a dark cypress tree.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Starry Night circle tattoo on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A round colour tattoo on a person's back reproduces Van Gogh's painting The Starry Night, with a swirling blue sky, yellow and orange stars and a crescent moon. A dark cypress tree sits on the left and a small village with a church spire is at the bottom edge. The thick, textured brushstroke-like lines and rich blues and yellows fill the circle, set against pale skin and a black open-back top.

Back Night sky Star Swirl Moon

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 sky over Hollin Meadow had gone the wrong colour by the time the last caravan rolled in, a thick churned blue that old Mabel Quine said meant the stars were loose. Her father laughed at her from the step of the Wonder Wagon, but he stopped laughing when the first star came out bigger than a cartwheel and hung low over the cypress trees at the edge of the field.

Keep reading

Mabel had a tin of yellow paint and a habit of drawing on everything. That night she climbed the ladder of the big wheel and dabbed the stars back into their places, one by one. The swirl would not sit still. Every time she set a star it pulled loose and wheeled off around the moon, a thin crescent the colour of a bent spoon, and the sky thickened around it like cream stirred the wrong way.

Down in the valley the village sat quiet with its little church spire, its lamps going out one at a time. The fair folk had a rule about that spire: never light it after dark. Mabel lit it anyway, with a match and a prayer half remembered from Sunday school, and the sky steadied. The stars settled into rings of gold, and the cypress stood black and patient on the hill like a man waiting for a bus.

Her father never asked what she had done. In the morning the wheel was painted clean and the sky above it still churned, and the showman went round the stalls telling everyone the stars were back where they belonged. He kept one eye on the sky all the same, and so did she.