Fine line tattoo of a dotted line with small star shapes running across the collarbone and shoulder, in black ink, on a light-skinned person wearing a white vest top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotted line with stars on the collarbone

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of a fine dotted line with four small five-pointed star shapes running across the upper chest and shoulder, just below the neck. The linework is thin and uses black ink with small, evenly spaced dots, and the stars vary slightly in size. The framing crops out the face and shows freckled skin, a hand pulling a white tank top strap, and a plain light grey background.

Fine line Shoulder Star Dotted line Collarbone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit there, where the steam can't reach you, and keep your hands off that ladle. Right. You want to know why a sensible man would draw a line of dots across his shoulders like a bus route. I'll tell you what Abel Pryce told me over a pan of herring the winter the Morwenna lost her chronometer off the Bay.

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For nine days the cloud sat on them like a wet blanket. No sun, no moon, nothing to swear by. Every night the cloud thinned for a quarter hour, and Abel was up on deck with his sextant before the stars could hide again. He'd prick each one into the chart with his brass pin, then draw dots between the pricks, one dot for every mile the log said they'd made. Dead reckoning, he called it, which is a fine name for a thing that keeps a crew alive. Some nights the dots were a mess and the pins were in the wrong places, and he'd sit at my table cursing the tea.

On the tenth night the sky opened clean and he found he'd been reading one star as another all along, the brass gone dull and the wrong glint in his eye. The line he'd drawn bent north when it should have run west. Half the crew wanted to put the helm over. Abel just sat there with the pin in his fist, looking at the dots, and then he counted them, slow, the way you'd count your children in a crowd. Dead reckoning had walked them that far. The last dot fell on the Scillies light, not three miles off, and the whole ship cheered like fools.

So when you ask me why he wears the line, I say it's the road he walked when he couldn't see the way. Now mind the herring, it's catching on the bottom of that pan.