Colour tattoo of Van Gogh's The Starry Night covering the upper arm, with a swirling blue sky, glowing yellow stars and a dark cypress tree.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Starry Night recreation on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo reproduces Van Gogh's painting The Starry Night across the outer upper arm. Swirling blue and white bands fill the sky, with glowing yellow stars and a moon, while a dark cypress tree and a small village sit along the lower edge. The painterly shading blends blues, purples and yellows with soft gradients, and the design wraps around the arm.

Upper arm Sky Star Moon Swirl Landscape

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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

You've got the ladder against the wrong wall again, Ted says, and you tell him the wall isn't the problem, the ceiling is. Forty feet of plaster above the stalls of the Regal, and Mrs Pargeter wants it blue by Whitsun. Nobody in Thornbury has seen a sky that wasn't grey since the war, so you mix the ultramarine with the cheap lead white they sell in Bristol and lay it on in long, impatient bands, the way you'd comb out wet hair.

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The stars take longer. Each one is a dab of chrome yellow with a halo you push outward with the flat of the brush until it seems to hum. Ted reckons they look like bruises. Ted has never ridden the bus home at eleven at night, watching the cypress at the top of Cold Harbour lean into the wind as if it's listening for something. You put that tree in too, dark as a boot, down the left side of the proscenium where the village sits: a dozen slate roofs, a church spire, the lit windows of the Crown.

On the last night the projectionist kills the house lights for the test. Nobody told you he'd do it. The room goes black and then the paint starts to glow, not the stars alone but the whole swirl, every blue band lifting off the plaster like a current moving under ice. Somebody in the back row says oh. Mrs Pargeter doesn't say anything at all.

You climb down the ladder in the dark, feeling for the rungs with your boots, and you don't look up, because you already know it's still turning.