Fine line black constellation tattoo on the side of a woman's torso, above the hip, with her wearing black lace lingerie.

Constellation tattoo on the side torso

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind and to the side, with her head cropped out of the frame. A small constellation of dots joined by thin lines sits on her side, near the ribs and above the waistband of her black mesh briefs. The shot is soft and warmly lit, with a pale background and blurred foreground edges framing the figure.

Fine line Dotwork Ribs Constellation Star Dot Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You spot Maud by the sports hall doors before she spots you, which is how it always went at school, her turning up late with a ring binder under one arm and a biro behind her ear. Twenty-two years have made her taller in the way people get taller once they stop slouching. She is holding a paper napkin covered in dots and frowning at it as if it has let her down.

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'You kept it,' you say. 'I lost it in the sixth form,' she says, 'and then I drew it again from memory, which was worse.' The napkin shows the pattern from Mr Pryce's field trip to Kielder, the one he swore was Lyra, the one you two argued about on the cold coach home because you were certain the brightest star belonged at the bottom, not the top.

Maud turns the napkin round. There are four more dots pencilled faintly in the margin, and a thin line joining the last one to a note in her cramped capitals: GARDEN, 2019. You ask what it means. She shrugs and says it is where she puts the things she wants to see from the ground. You realise she has been mapping the sky over her own life, one dot at a time, the way Pryce taught you to find north by counting.

The lights dim for the raffle. Maud folds the napkin into a square and presses it into your palm. 'Your turn,' she says. You open it and find a single fresh dot in blue biro with no line leading to it at all. 'Start one,' she says. 'That's the whole trick.'