Full colour sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and forearm showing a planet, starfighter, airship, city skyline and sea creatures in a painterly realism style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Surreal sky and city full sleeve

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A full sleeve tattoo wraps the arm of a person shown in side profile, wearing a dark green top. The design layers a large planet and an orange-red cloud burst above a starfighter, a drifting airship, a pale cloud bank, a distant city skyline and flocks of birds, with whales or fish and a tree lower down. The shading is soft and blended, with bright colour dominating over a blurred white gallery wall with framed artworks.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Planet Cloud City skyline Bird Whale Tree Balloon Space Sky

Find an artist for this

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

The Marguerite had been grounded over the Thames marshes for nine days before anyone climbed up to see why. Gulls would not perch on her, which Sam said was a bad sign, and the lamplighters swore the balloon tethered beside her had been drifting toward the city all week as if it wanted to be somewhere else. I was sent up the rigging because I was the lightest, and because nobody else would admit to being afraid of heights.

Keep reading

Up top the air smelled of hot copper and something sweeter, like oranges left too long in a cupboard. The gasbag had torn along a seam, and through the rip I could see sky that was not the sky over Essex. It was a thick, bruised orange, the colour of a burst bramble, and somewhere in it a starfighter with its wings set in an X hung motionless, as if it had been waiting for someone to notice. Below, the city skyline stood on a pale bank of cloud, every chimney lit and not one window showing a face.

I did what my grandfather taught me: patch the thing you can reach, then tell the truth. I stitched the tear with waxed linen, and as I tied off the last knot a whale rolled past beneath the cloud bank, slow as a dropped coin, with a shoal of silver fish spilling after it. Then the birds came in a long black ribbon from the city, straight at the airship, and did not land. They turned once above the mast and went back the way they had come.

When I climbed down, the lamplighters asked what I had found. I said nothing that would go in a logbook, only that the tree at the top of the mast had put out a single leaf in the night, and it was the exact colour of the sky I had seen through the tear. Nobody believed me, but the Marguerite lifted at dawn with the gulls following, and I have not looked at the moon since without checking it still has its proper face.