Colour tattoo of Van Gogh's Starry Night, with swirling blue and yellow sky and a dark cypress, in a circle on the outer thigh.

Starry Night painting tattoo on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A circular colour tattoo on the outer thigh reproduces Van Gogh's painting The Starry Night, with a dark cypress tree on the left and a village beneath a swirling night sky. The thick, rhythmic brushwork is rendered in layered blues, teals and yellows, with bright star and moon highlights. The tattoo fills the frame centrally, and the wearer's fingers hold the edge of a denim short at the top.

Thigh Night sky Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night sister on Ward Seven had a rule that nobody sat down before the bell, so the porter, Tomasz Hale, stood by the lift with his mop bucket and told her the sky would turn over before morning. She didn't look up. She said the sky had been turning over since before the hospital was built and had never once asked her permission.

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Tomasz carried a picture of a sky in his head that his grandmother had described from a library book in Leeds. Blue like the inside of a mussel shell, she said, with stars too big for their places and a village asleep under a tree that looked like a flame someone had forgotten to put out. He had never seen the picture. He carried it anyway, the way you carry a coat someone told you was warm.

Around three a boy of nine came up from A&E with his arm in a sling and a torch in his good hand, and asked where the stars went in the daytime. Tomasz took him to the window at the end of the corridor, where the glass was cold and the car park lights made a yellow smear. He pointed at the swirl of light above the bins and said the stars went round and round until somebody needed them, then came back out all together, like sheep through a gate.

The boy nodded as if he had been waiting his whole life for that fact. When the nurse came to take him back he left the torch on the sill. At dawn Tomasz found it still switched on, its small beam wheeling across the ceiling, and he left it there until the day shift came to fetch it.