Colour tattoo of Van Gogh's Starry Night inside a heart framed with white beads, shown on the forearm in a neo-trad style.

Starry Night heart on forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A heart-shaped tattoo reproduces the swirling sky, crescent moon and stars of Van Gogh's Starry Night, with a dark cypress tree and a small village at the lower edge. The painterly shading uses blues, yellows and touches of pink, set within a bold black outline and a border of white dots. The heart sits centrally on the forearm, with a green leaf branch and another coloured tattoo partly visible above and beside it.

Neo-trad Forearm Heart Moon Star Night sky Bead

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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

Now, sit closer, because the ceiling at the Palais on Marlow Pier was never meant for lamplight. Ask any of the old ones. In nineteen thirty-one a painter called Tobias Quill came up from the coast with a ladder, a tin of ultramarine and no money, and Mrs Ashdown let him have the roof in exchange for a winter's keep.

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He painted the sky the way a man paints when he is trying to get something out of his chest. Swirls, like the wind had got into the plaster. Five yellow moons, fat as bread rolls. A black cypress in the corner, tall as a verger, and under it a little church with its windows lit for a wedding that never happened. Every Saturday the band played beneath it and nobody looked up, except Dolly Farrow, who looked up every single time.

Dolly was courted by a rigger from the Royal Pier who could not dance to save his life. He would stand at the edge of the floor counting moons while she went round with other men. Then one February night the power failed and the hall went black, and he finally saw what she saw. The stars were still there, painted in a glow powder Tobias had mixed from his own pearl pigment. He took her hand in the dark, and with no music to lead them they walked the outline of that church as if it were a village they could step into.

When the lamps came back on, the painted stars had gone dim and the floor was empty but for two people and a dropped glove. Quill's cypress is still up there, if you stand on the third step of the gallery and tip your head. They say it points at the man who asked her. I say it points at the door, and that is where I would take you now, before the band starts again.