Healed tattoo of red, yellow, blue and black stars following a grey shaded swirl across the outer top of a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Coloured stars swirl across a foot

Other · Mixed · Photo

A bare foot shows a tattoo of five-pointed stars in red, yellow, blue and black, trailing from a curled grey swirl near the ankle down towards the sole. The stars have solid colour fills with dark outlines, while the swirl and the spaces between the stars are softly shaded in grey. The design wraps diagonally along the foot against a dark textured mat, with the colour concentrated in the larger stars.

Other Star Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You reach the cairn at Scarth Gap an hour after the last light, the mule's lead rope wound twice around your glove and the wind shoving grey cloud along the track below. Your sister said not to cross after dark. You told her the sky would be clear, and it is, the stars scattered like sparks thrown off a forge, each one bright enough to read the path by.

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Old Mair at the inn had told you the lights above the pass were not stars at all but lanterns carried by drovers who died in the snow, and that they kept walking, always a step ahead of the living. You laughed at her over the bottom of your cup. Now the red one above the drop burns steadier than the rest, and the yellow one beside it winks as though to say the line is good. You follow them down the slope, the wind curling behind you like a loose ribbon.

Near the bottom the path bends round a shoulder of rock, and the lanterns drift apart. The largest, a cold blue, hangs low over the stream. The mule plants its hooves and refuses to move, ears flat, eyes fixed on nothing you can see. You open your mouth to scold it, then stop, because a small black star has slipped down the last stretch of the sky and come to rest at the edge of the water, exactly where your father's boot prints used to end.

You stand there a long time, counting. Every one of them is still in the sky. You are the only one who has not yet come home, and the mule, impatient, shoves its nose into your shoulder until you turn and walk on.