Fine line black constellation tattoo of star shapes joined by thin lines across a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Constellation tattoo across upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A back view of a person with dark hair pinned up, showing a constellation tattoo made of small black star shapes, dots and thin connecting lines. The linework is fine and even, with the stars drawn as solid points of varying size. The tattoo is in black ink on warm skin, with a soft, slightly dim background.

Fine line Back Constellation Star Dot 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

Shift your chairs nearer the grate, the lot of you, and mind that door, which has been letting the snow in since Tuesday. You'll want to hear why the Carrick girls never left the high farm, and that starts with the sky, which nobody can be trusted with unless someone joins it up for them.

Keep reading

Nessa Carrick was nine when she pinned the winter stars to a board in the barn. She used a bag of darning thread and a ha'penny nail for each bright one, running the thread from point to point until the hunter, the plough and the seven sisters stood out in black lines on the planks. Her father laughed and said stars don't keep to lines, they keep to nothing, and that a sensible girl would learn her sheep. She learned both. When the fog came down thick over the moor, she'd stand at the gate and find the wall gap by the thread in her head.

The year the pass snowed shut, three ewes and a ram went up beyond the cairn, and Nessa went after them with the board tucked under her arm like a shield. The fog came in at noon. She followed the thread she had drawn, the bent one that ran over an empty patch where she'd never put a star, and it walked her straight over the drift and down to the lambs huddled in the lee of a rock. Her father never knew whether she'd been lucky or whether she had simply drawn the line that brought her home.

I'll tell you what the old folk here say, and then you can have the last of the ale. A line between two stars is only a promise that someone was looking. Nessa's board hung in that barn until the roof came in, and to this day nobody has found a single star on it that was in the right place.