Fine dotted-line constellation tattoo in black ink on the inner forearm, with a navy dress and green leaves in the background.

Constellation tattoo on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small constellation made of fine dotted lines and a star-shaped mark sits on the inner forearm of a person wearing a navy dress. The tattoo is in black ink with no shading, and the dots and thin lines make up a simple star pattern. The arm runs diagonally across the frame against a blurred green foliage background.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Constellation Star

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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

Third night of cloud and still no sight of the Plough past the bow. Mr Fenwick has taken the sextant below twice now, muttering that the damp is getting into the glass, so I have stopped pretending to be useful on deck. Instead I sat at the saloon table with the spare chart and drew the old stars from memory: the four-cornered bowl, the handle bending off towards the south-west, the way my father sketched them on the backs of feed invoices when I was small.

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Every dot felt like an argument with the paper. The lamp keeps swinging and the ink pools wherever the ship lurches. At the end of the handle I set down the bright star, the one that never seems to move while the rest wheel round it, and then I wrote Fenwick's initials beside it, because he always says a navigator should sign his guesses.

At four bells the cloud tore open over the port quarter. Fenwick came up with the glass still in his hand, looked at the sky, then at my page, and was quiet so long I thought I'd got it wrong. Then he tapped the bowl with one finger. 'Handle's bent,' he said. 'You've got it right.'

When I came back below I found the page pinned to the bulkhead above the chart table, the bent handle traced over in pencil, and under it, in his square capitals, our heading for the morning.