A colour tattoo of purple and pink stars with black outlines and soft shading, running along the inside of a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cascading stars on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A forearm carries a line of stars that grow larger towards the elbow. The three largest stars are filled with purple and pink shading and have dark outlines, while smaller outlined stars in black and grey trail along the arm. The soft grey shadows behind the stars add depth against a plain light background.

Forearm Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boat is already halfway out of the cove when you realise you have forgotten the lamp, and Ines is shouting from the stern that the sky will do the job. You don't believe her. You go back up the shingle with your bare feet slipping on the weed and take the paraffin lamp from the nail by the door, where your grandfather hung it the winter before the big storm took the north pier.

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Out past the breakwater the water goes flat and dark as ink, and the first stars come up over Scarrow Head one at a time, then all at once. Ines points with her chin. Three large ones sit low in the south, bright enough to throw a shadow across the hull, and trailing away from their edges, smaller and hollow-eyed, go the others, as though someone had dragged a fistful of sequins down the sky and let them fall. Your grandfather called that the wake. He said the big ones were the boats that had gone ahead, and the little ones were the crews who had stayed behind to mend the nets and keep the kettle warm.

You ask Ines which of them is the harbour. She laughs and says the harbour is a thing you carry, not a thing you can point at, which is the kind of answer her mother gave, and you tell her so. She doesn't argue. She is watching the smallest star at the end of the trail, the one that seems to shiver when the swell lifts the boat.

You light the lamp anyway, turn the wick low, and hang it from the bow where the small stars can see it. The light is poor and yellow beside the sky, but it makes a bright patch on the water, and one by one the little stars seem to lean down towards it, the way children lean towards a door left open.