Close-up of a shoulder tattoo with a blue and teal wash city skyline, a thin black heartbeat line and four pink stars beneath it.

City skyline, heartbeat line and four stars on shoulder

Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A blue and teal wash city skyline sits across the shoulder, with a fine black heartbeat line running from its left edge and rising at the right. Four solid pink stars sit in a row below the skyline. The skyline is softly shaded while the heartbeat line is crisp and thin, and the pink stars give the piece its strongest colour against the pale skin and black top.

Shoulder Skyline City Heartbeat Star Line

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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

The flag over the grain elevator had lost two stars to the winter, and Ada Pell was the only sign painter left on the east side who would climb the ladder for a fee that didn't cover her boots.

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She worked from a cradle on the eleventh floor, with the river going brown below and a seismograph needle chattering in the water board office through the open window, a thin black line that nobody bothered to read. Her father had painted the first set of stars at this same rail in 1961, and had left a tin of crimson lake in the cupboard with his initials scratched into the lid. The pink she mixed herself came out closer to the colour of the sky at six, when the gulls go quiet and the bakeries start.

On the third afternoon the needle jumped. The telephone rang in the office below, a clerk shouted that the east wall had moved, and the whole of Fenwick Street stopped to look up at her. Ada held her brush steady, finished the star she was on, and only then looked down. A boy was counting under his breath between the rumble of a lorry and the shiver of the glass, and she understood that the line she had been trying to copy all week was never on the paper at all. It was the street, going on.

She dipped the brush, lifted her chin at the river, and painted a fifth star in the corner where the skyline met the sky, small and bright and not on any council drawing, because it was hers to put there.