Black and grey dotwork design of a multi-pointed star with a stippled centre circle, drawn as a flash-style tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork star with a stippled sunburst

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A multi-pointed star or sunburst is drawn at the centre of the image, with a solid black inner ring of spikes around a shaded circle. The points fade from solid black at their bases to fine stippled dots at their tips, creating a sense of depth. The drawing is in black ink on a white background, with no colour and no body placement shown.

Dotwork Geometric Star Sunburst Circle Spike

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On the Ouse, the old bargemen said the sun was a lamp a fisherman had carried out of the water long ago, and that it had burned down to a stub. Every spring someone had to light it again or the fog would sit on the river until Lammas. Nobody remembered why the lamp needed lighting until Hannah Crewe, who kept the barge Thistledown with her brother Joss, found a star scratched into the lock gate at Naburn.

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The star had sixteen points, the bargemen said, eight solid as ironwood at the base and eight that thinned to dust at the tips, so you could never tell where the light stopped. Joss laughed and said the lock-keeper had only drawn it with a nail. But on the morning the fog lay thick over the meadows, Hannah carried a tin of soot, a bent pin and a pot of lamp oil down to the gate and began to dot.

She worked all day, pricking the wood with tiny marks, the dots crowding close around the centre until the circle looked like a moon full of rain. Joss came down at dusk to watch, shivering on the towpath, and saw the points fading outward from the middle, each one reaching a little further into the mist than the last.

When she finished, the fog drew back like a sheet pulled off a bed, and a pale sun stood over the water. Joss never again called it a nail's work. The lock gate still bears the star, though the bargemen now say Hannah lit the sun, and that she used nothing but a pin.