Fine line black constellation tattoo of connected dots and lines on the inside of a wrist, with a raised hand and lilac nails in view.

Constellation tattoo on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a constellation made of black dots joined by thin lines sits on the inner wrist of a hand held up against a pale paved background. The linework is fine and the dots are solid black, with no shading. The ink is black on light skin, and the soft daylight shows the design clearly while the lilac nail polish adds a little colour to the frame.

Fine line Forearm Constellation Star Dot Line Wrist

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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

Dear Mabel, the copper plate came back from the printer in Leith with every star in the right place except the ones I set myself. Mr Harrow says a chart is a promise that the sky will hold still long enough for a man to find his way home, and I have spent the week squinting at my pinpricks trying to work out which promise he meant.

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He made me mark each star with the needle point, one dot per light, then rule the lines between them with a steel nib so fine that a held breath would bend it. Ten dots for the crooked arm of the hunter, he said, and not one more, because a sailor reads the heavens by what he can count, not by what he hopes is there. I counted until my eyes watered and my fingers smelled of acid and lamp oil.

Last night the fog came off the Forth all at once, and a boy from the Margaret Rae came up the stairs asking to be shown the sky his father steered by. I took him to the window and we looked for a long time. The stars in the glass were not where my chart had them. They had shifted a finger's width while I was not looking, as they always do, and the lines I had ruled so carefully pointed at nothing at all.

I have left the printed chart exactly as Harrow taught me. Beside it, in pencil so faint the printer will never see it, I have drawn one more line, running from the last dot down past the edge of the paper, to the place where the sky goes on.