Forearm tattoo of five blue-shaded stars linked by black and grey swirling ribbons that wrap up the arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue stars and swirling ribbons on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows several five-pointed stars filled with light blue shading, arranged along a sweeping S-shaped path of black and grey ribbon-like wisps. The wisps are softly shaded with smooth gradients and curl into spirals at the bends. The colour is limited to the blue stars against the grey tones of the swirls and the skin, and the design runs diagonally up the forearm.

Forearm Star Swirl Ribbon Spiral

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 ribbon came off the sill at half past five, the way the wind always did in Porthgwyn, and Ada Penrose watched it lift over the harbour wall with three tin stars still knotted into its tail. Her father would have shouted. He had been dead eleven winters, and the only one left to scold her was the gulls, who did it every morning from the chimney of the chandlery.

Keep reading

She fetched the ladder from the net loft and climbed the sea wall, where the ribbon had snagged on a gorse bush and was sulking in the wind like a kite with no string. The stars were the colour her father had mixed from bluebell dye and a shilling's worth of lamp black, a blue that looked wet even when it dried. He had painted every one of them himself in the back room above the pilchard barrels, and he used to say a star without light in it was only a bit of tin with ambitions.

She freed the ribbon by unpicking the knot one curl at a time, the way you unwind a cold rope. Each bend she loosened tightened into a spiral that wanted to go back to the sea. By the time the sun lay flat on the water she had strung all five stars along the grey wisps again, from the lamp post to the rocks at Scar Point, and the fleet was coming round the headland in a line of lanterns.

She counted the boats as they passed under the ribbon. Eleven. Twelve. Her cousin's boat came last, and as it crossed the line of stars its skipper looked up, lifted one hand off the tiller, and steered in. Ada tied the final knot with her teeth and went home to bed. In the morning nobody in the village could say who had hung the ribbon there, only that it had kept the boats on course all night.