Colour realism tattoo on the upper arm and shoulder showing a woman's face beside a purple planet, a red desert horizon and a floating astronaut.

Woman's face and astronaut in a space scene

Realism · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm, showing a greyscale woman's face with a dark, sweeping hairline merging into a night sky. Beside her, a glowing purple planet, scattered stars and a red desert horizon sit above a floating astronaut in a dark suit. Soft blended shading, smooth gradients and loose purple and blue brushstroke swooshes frame the composition.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Woman Face Planet Astronaut Space Star Desert Brushstroke

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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

Sit closer, the coal's near out and I'll not shout over the trams. You want the one about the painter's daughter who climbed onto the roof of Dellow Mill every night for a year? Good. Everybody in Harrow Street knows the start of it, few know the end.

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She was called Ada Finch and she painted nothing but the sky, the same violet sky over and over, the colour of a bruise going off. Her father said it was gaslight on the wet slates. Ada said there was a world past the last star where the ground ran red as a fox and a planet hung over it like a lamp somebody had forgotten to lift. She sketched it on the backs of ration tickets. Nobody paid her a penny for it.

One November a man came up the ladder with a tin lunchbox and a suit that shone like wet tar. He had a rope round his middle and a helmet with no face in it, only the roofs and the moon reflected back. He said he'd come down from that red world, that the planet was his house and it was going dark. Ada asked him to hold still so she could paint him. He laughed and said nobody paints the cold.

She painted him anyway, brushing purple round his shoulders like wind. When she came back at dawn the roof was empty except for a single white glove and the lunchbox, full of red sand. Her father still has the canvas in the back room. Look at the lower corner, that's where the rope goes. Mind the cat on your way out.