Small blue starfish tattoo with soft shading on the back of a heel, photographed on a dark surface.

Blue starfish on a heel

Other · Colour · Photo

A single starfish with five arms sits on the back of a heel, shown from a low angle with a bare foot and a trouser hem at the top of the frame. The starfish is outlined in darker blue with lighter blue shading toward the centre, giving it a slightly raised, dimensional look. The background is a dark leather-look surface, which makes the blue ink stand out against the pale skin.

Other Starfish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Maren kept the walled garden at the end of Salt Lane, and the wall ran down to the shingle so that at high water the sea knocked on the other side of the bricks. Each spring the storms left things in her beds: bleached crab claws, a ship's bell, once a glass float the colour of weak tea. Nothing she found there surprised her, until the morning the blue star lay face down under the rhubarb.

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It was no bigger than her palm, five arms, and the blue of a jay's wing gone cold at the edges. She knew without asking that it had not come over the wall on a wave. The gate latch had been lifted in the night, and the rhubarb leaves were pressed flat in a little path leading to the sea door. Her grandson Tobin, who was nine and certain of everything, said it had walked. Maren did not argue, because she had once seen a thing walk, a long time ago, and it had been wiser than to ask for help.

She carried the star down through the marsh grass in her apron, Tobin trotting behind with a bucket. At the tideline she knelt on the wet sand and set it down. The star did not move for a long while. Then one arm curled, slowly, the way a sleeper turns, and the whole body lifted toward the water as if reaching for a hand that had been holding it up all along.

Tobin asked whether it would remember them. Maren said the sea remembers everything and lets most of it go, which is the only kindness it has. They walked home without looking back. Next morning the gate was shut and the rhubarb stood straight, and on the flat stone by the door lay a single blue thread, dry as paper, which she kept in the tin with the ship's bell.