Fine line black constellation tattoos scattered across the upper arm and shoulder of a person wearing a thin strap.

Constellation tattoos across an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Several small constellations made of dots joined by hairline lines are spread across the upper arm and shoulder. The linework is very thin and the star points are filled as solid black dots of varying sizes. The ink is black on pale skin, set against a soft grey-blue background with a plain composition.

Fine line Upper arm Shoulder Constellation Star Dot Line

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

Maren had worked the night shift at the Lanteglos crossing for eleven years, long enough to stop trusting the sky to match the paperwork. The lorry idled under the sodium lamps while its driver, a broad man with a sunburnt neck, leaned out of his window holding a photocopied star chart with a child's handwriting in the margin.

Keep reading

'My daughter made it for school,' he said. 'She says the Plough is wrong. Says it should point at the brightest one, not the dim one next to it. Is she right?' Maren took the chart and held it up against the clear black above the barrier. The dots were heavy and uneven, joined by lines drawn so fine they looked like a thought someone had almost forgotten. In the corner, a shape of five stars sat outside every map she had ever learned, with a sixth dot pressed in afterwards, as if added in a hurry.

'She's right about the pointer,' Maren said, and handed it back. 'Tell her the lines are ours. The stars never asked to be joined.' He laughed and asked what the extra dot was called. She didn't know. He said his daughter called that one the Kettle, because it boiled over when you weren't watching, and he wanted to know whether it was in any book. Maren stamped his papers slowly on purpose, because she had a feeling the barrier could wait.

When the lorry rolled through, she stepped out into the cold and looked up. Nobody had ever named the five stars and the stray sixth. She found them without the chart, the way you find a face in a crowd, and drew a line between two she had always ignored. Then she went back inside and wrote KETTLE in the margin of her own log, in capitals, so the next shift would know where to look.