Realistic colour tattoo of a glowing red sun, a small blue planet, an asteroid and metallic spacecraft parts across an upper arm and shoulder.

Sun, planets and spacecraft on an arm sleeve

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder with a space scene. A large glowing red-orange sun with mottled surface detail dominates the top, with a small teal planet and a dark rocky fragment beside it. Lower down, a teal starfield surrounds a blue-grey asteroid and metallic cylindrical spacecraft components with shaded highlights.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Sun Planet Star Space

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sun was the colour of a bad burn when Mags and I cut the tug loose from the Halvard relay, and she swore it had grown since the last shift. We had three days of fuel left and one job, which was to drag the dead canisters off the rock at Tessel's Belt before the claim office sent someone who would ask questions.

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The asteroid we moored to was a grey lump the size of a parish, pocked and cold, with a teal sheen where ice had come up through the crust. The old miners called the cairns along one face pilgrims' markers, though nobody could say who had stacked them. Mags tied the first cylinder to the winch and tapped the gauge twice, which meant the rig was holding.

Halfway through the third canister the gauge dropped to nothing and the sun flared over the ridge, so bright the cabin went copper. I thought we were finished. Instead the needle crept back up, slow as a tide, and the cylinder swung free with a hum I felt in my back teeth. Something inside it was still warm, still holding the sun's light.

We hauled forty-one canisters that shift and sold thirty-nine. The two we kept we stood on the galley table like a pair of stubborn lodgers, and every morning when the sun came through the port Mags said good morning to them, and I said nothing, and we both knew which of us had been right.