Fine line constellation tattoo of blue star points joined by thin black lines on the inner upper arm.

Constellation of blue stars on the upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a constellation of around fifteen small star shapes in blue ink, linked by fine black hairlines that form a open, angular pattern. The stars vary slightly in size, and the lines are even and delicate against the skin. The design sits on a plain, pale arm against a grey background, with a dark sleeve at the top right of the frame.

Fine line Upper arm Constellation Star Line Night sky

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

Old Mabel Trewin kept the chart table in the back room of the Gull's Rest, and every winter she drew the sky again from memory, because the lamp in the window smoked and blurred the real one. She said the stars did not care where you put the lines between them, but the boats did. A line in the wrong place sent a man onto the Carrick rocks.

Keep reading

Her grandson Tom thought this was nonsense and said so at supper, with the salt cellar between them and the boarders listening over their mutton. He would draw his own sky, he said, one with no lines at all, just the lights, and let the fishermen find their own way like they always had.

That night the sea came up the lane and into the cellar, and the lamp went out in the window. Tom ran to the cliff with a pen in his coat pocket and a jar of blue ink he had been saving for a sign. Out past the headland the stars were there, scattered and cold, and he could not tell one from another. He sat down on the wet grass and, because his hands had nothing else to do, he drew from the nearest bright star to the next, a hairline in black, then another, until the pattern his grandmother had taught him rose out of the dark like a path. A boat saw it and turned for the harbour.

Next morning Mabel said nothing about the ink. She only pushed a fresh chart across the table, and on it, in her cramped hand, she had joined the stars in the same blue. Tom looked for a long time before he understood she had been waiting for him to do it himself.