Colour tattoo of pink, blue and purple stars with black swirling linework on the inner wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Coloured stars and swirls on a wrist

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A cluster of five-pointed stars in blue, pink and purple, each with a black outline, runs diagonally down the inner wrist. Thin black swirls and curling tails connect the stars and extend towards the top and bottom of the design. The purple star has soft shading inside its outline, and the lighter stars are filled with flat colour against plain skin.

Forearm Star Swirl Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Achebe paid me in tins of cocoa, which I told her was not legal tender, and she laughed and said the shutter of her kite shop had waited six winters for someone who could paint a comet without making it look like a sneeze.

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I mixed the purple first, because purple had been her late husband's colour, and I painted the big star in the centre as if it were the moon rising over the harbour wall. Pink went on the left and blue on the top, where the paint ran a little and I let it. The tail was the hard part. I kept my finest brush for it and pulled each swirl out in one breath, the way you would draw a kite string out of a tangle, until the black line swept down past the hinge and into the gutter.

On the third morning a boy from the chip shop stood under it with his mouth open. He said the stars had come down the wall in the night, and when I looked, the lowest curl had grown a finger's width past where I had stopped it. I had not touched it since Sunday. Mrs Achebe only shrugged and said that was what comets did when nobody was watching them.

I still don't know whether the shutter moved or I did. The kite shop has been sold twice since, and the new owners painted over the gutter, but the tail still stops at the same place. Every winter a gull lands on the last curl and looks down at the harbour as though it is waiting for the next star to fall.