Colour tattoo of a swirling blue and yellow night sky with orange stars across a woman's shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swirling night sky tattoo on shoulder

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo reproduces a painterly swirling night sky in blue, yellow and white, with orange star-like circles scattered through the swirls. The brushstroke-style linework and soft blending give it a painted, textured look, and the design wraps over the shoulder and down the upper arm. The person is shown from the neck down against a red brick wall, with a dark top and the tattoo as the clear focus.

Shoulder Upper arm Night sky Swirl Star Sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire's gone low and I'm too old to shout over it. You want to know why the sky over Vellmoor turns like a churn of cream on a bad night? It's because of Ottilie Marrow, who was the king's ceiling-painter and a terrible servant.

Keep reading

The king wanted his bedchamber night held still. Plain black, he said, with pins of silver set where his astrologers told him. Ottilie took the commission and then ignored it. Every evening she climbed the scaffold with a bucket of deep blue and a stub of yellow ochre, and every morning the ministers came with brushes of their own to scrub out what she'd made. The wind in her strokes would not lie down, and the stars kept swelling up like oranges in a bowl.

Then came the drought year. The astrologers said the sky was dead, and the wells sank to mud. Ottilie went up the scaffold one last time and painted the whole ceiling wet and heavy, the swirls low over the rooftops like a sea about to break. Three days later the clouds came over the pass, and the rain fell as if the sky had only been waiting for permission.

The king had the ceiling cut out and hung in the square so the people could see what a stubborn servant could do. Some nights, if you stand where the cobbles dip, you can still make it out up there. Look close at the orange stars and you'll find they're lamps in the windows, every one lit by someone too stubborn to sleep.