Colour tattoo on a shoulder and upper arm reproducing Van Gogh's Starry Night, with a blue police box floating in the swirling sky above a village.

Starry Night sleeve with a blue police box

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder and reproduces the swirling night sky of a famous post-impressionist painting, with a blue police box shape set among the clouds and stars. Thick, textured brushstroke-like linework and shading create the painted effect, with yellow stars and moons against layered blues and greens. The lower section shows a dark village with a church spire and rooftops, and the composition is cropped at the shoulder and elbow.

Upper arm Shoulder Police box Star Moon Cloud Hill

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night the blue box came down over Sallowmere, my mother was on the church roof arguing with the weathervane, and the whole sky was turning like a dog before it settles. Nobody believed me afterwards, though the sexton's boy swore he saw it too, a little box of blue paint the size of a bread oven, drifting between the yellow moons as if it had lost its way to market.

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Ansel Crewe, who had painted our hills for three winters without once sleeping in a bed, stood in the lane with brushes stuck in his cap. He said the sky was his and somebody had stolen a piece of it. The box had landed in the clouds rather than on the hill, and when its door opened it let out a smell of hot metal and oranges.

A thin man in a long coat stepped out and asked, very politely, whether we had a bell that rang backwards. Mother said no. He studied the spire for a long moment, then looked at my hands, which were blue to the wrist from the dye vats, and said I would do.

He went up the steeple with Ansel and came down an hour later without the coat. The box was gone, but the stars over Sallowmere now swirled in one wide curl, and every lamp in the village burned gold at the same moment. Ansel signed the sky in the corner of the church door, small as a thumbprint. Some nights I still look up and find the blue box there, parked among the clouds, waiting for someone who knows how to ring the bell backwards.