Black and white photo of a hand resting on a shoulder, with a small dotwork star cluster tattoo in black ink on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork star cluster on a shoulder

Dotwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white close-up of a hand resting on a bare shoulder and upper arm. Several clusters of fine black dots are scattered across the skin, forming a constellation-like pattern, with one cluster partly visible near the lower edge. The image is high contrast with soft natural shading and a dark background.

Dotwork Shoulder Upper arm Star Dot Constellation

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

Your mother will tell you the pricking was the worst of it, but she never sat through the frost nights at the Tallow Observatory with a goose quill and a pot of lamp-black, so she cannot know. Every star on the northern chart costs a dot of ink and a little more of my patience. Lord Ferrant wants the whole sky of Cassavell fixed on vellum before the river freezes, and he will not accept a blot for a star, so I work with my breath held and my elbow braced on a folded sheet of wool.

Keep reading

Old Master Corran taught me that a dot is never just a dot. He showed me the cluster of seven he called the Lantern Women, pricked so close together that from a yard away they look like one smudge of soot. He said they were the first stars anyone in Cassavell ever steered by, and that a surveyor who gets them wrong will walk his men into the marsh. I have pricked them four times now, and each time the ink spreads a little more than I meant.

Last night the sky cleared at last. I climbed to the leads with the chart under my coat and held it up against the stars, and the seven matched the sky so exactly that I laughed out loud and woke the gardener's dog. Then I counted again and found an eighth, dim and low, just where Corran had left a small smudge in the margin with the word Idrel beside it. Idrel was my sister's name before she went over the pass with the salt caravan. I have never written it on any map. I took up the quill and set a single dot beside her star, and the chart is finished now, though nobody but me will know why.