Colour tattoo of a watercolour-style galaxy with pink, purple and blue clouds and small star sparkles across the upper arm and shoulder.

Watercolour galaxy on an upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A woman's upper arm and shoulder carry a large tattoo of a nebula or galaxy in soft, blended washes of pink, violet and teal. The edges fade into the skin with a painterly, watercolour-like effect, and small white star sparkles are scattered through the purple and blue areas. The composition runs diagonally down the arm against a dark background, and the woman's head is cropped out of frame.

Upper arm Shoulder Galaxy Nebula Star Space Watercolour

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 galley on the Corran Star smelled of burnt onions and bleach at half past three, which was when I did my real work. Nobody asks a cook what she does between the breakfast slop and the lunch rush, so nobody knew about the paint box wedged behind the flour bins. It had been my mother's, a tin of pan watercolours with the reds worn down to pink. I'd bought cheap cartridge paper in Hull, and every night I laid a sheet on the steel prep table and let the washes run.

Keep reading

Mostly I painted the sky I could see through the porthole above the sink, which at sea was never the same sky twice. Off Finisterre the dark had been so thick it looked like wet slate, so I pulled a violet down through it with a soaked brush and dropped teal in where the cloud broke. Where the paper went thin I flicked water from my fingers and let it bloom. The stars went in last, with the tip of a cocktail stick dipped in bleach, which lifts the colour and leaves small pale sparks.

Ruairi, the second mate, found me at it one night. He stood in the doorway in his oilskins, dripping on the lino, and asked whether it was a nebula. I told him it was a dinner plate that had gone wrong. He pulled a chair over anyway and tilted the sheet under the strip light the way you'd read a chart. He said he'd seen the real thing from the bridge wing off the Azores, a smear of pink he'd taken for weather.

I gave him the sheet. He folded it into his jacket and went back up to the wheelhouse, and I scrubbed the trays and wiped the brushes. Two nights later I found it pinned above the chart table, between the tide tables and a calendar of Norwegian fjords, and he'd left a clean margin at the bottom, as if he expected another one.