Black and grey fine line dotwork tattoo of a constellation-like design with arrows, circles and starbursts across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line constellation across the upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of connected lines, dots and small starburst shapes forms a constellation-like pattern across the skin. Thin single lines, stippled dotwork and a few circular arcs make up the design, with an arrow-like shape at the lower left. The black and white photograph is taken close up, with the design running diagonally across the frame.

Fine line Dotwork Back Constellation Star Dot Line Arrow Circle Starburst

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night after the Hollin fall, my brother Tom drew the sky on the back of a wage slip, because the lamp had gone dead in the lift and he needed something to do with his hands. He joined the dots the way our mam joined them in her recipe book, one line to the next, and he swore the arrow pointed down the valley towards the old Number Four shaft, where the men were still under.

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Nobody in Clayhead believed in stars that winter. We had the buzzer, the slag heaps, and the bank smoking at the edge of the allotments. But Tom kept the sky folded in his top pocket, soft as cloth from handling, and every morning he walked it up to the rescue shed and held it against the window so the deputies could see which way the cage ought to come up.

The overman laughed at him, called him the Admiral, and said the stars had no business under a mountain of rock. Tom only shrugged and said the stars were fine, it was the shaft markings that were wrong, that somebody had copied the plans out in a hurry. On the seventh morning the cage rang up with four men and a whippet dog, and the overman went quiet and took his cap off.

The slip went in the bin with the tea leaves. I fished it out before the cleaners came and kept the bit with the arrow, folded it into my Bible at Ruth's, and every night since I have followed the dots past the edge of the paper, where Tom stopped drawing, and I still don't know where they lead.