Mixed colour and black linework tattoo on a person's upper back showing a girl seen from behind beneath a black swirling tree, with a Van Gogh style Starry Night sky.

Girl beneath a swirling tree in a Starry Night sky

Neo-trad · Back · Mixed · Photo

A girl with long hair in a pinafore style dress stands on a dark ground, seen from behind, beneath a large black tree whose branches curl across the top of the design. The sky behind her is painted in swirling blue and yellow strokes with glowing orange moons and stars, echoing Van Gogh's Starry Night, while the girl and tree are rendered in engraved-style black hatching. The design spans the shoulder blade area and is shown in a close, well-lit photograph of bare skin.

Neo-trad Back Girl Tree Moon Star Swirl Hill Sky Dress Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The vicar had promised the rain would hold off until the speeches, and for once he was right, which unsettled everyone more than rain would have. I slipped out of the marquee with my shoes in one hand and my sash snagging on every bramble, and walked up the lane to the hill where the old hawthorn stood alone, its branches bent into curls like the ends of a violin.

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Above the hill the sky had gone wrong in the loveliest way. The blue was not blue but a slow whirlpool, strokes of ultramarine pushed round and round like cream stirred into coffee, and three orange moons hung in it, fat and glowing, as if someone had tried to put the warmth of a kitchen into the night. Grandad had a book with a picture of it. He said the painter had watched stars like that from a window in a hospital in the south of France and painted them anyway, because waiting for the world to look right was no use to anybody. I had thought that the saddest thing I had ever heard. Standing under the tree, I was not so sure.

Behind me the music started up, a fiddle sawing at something old, and I heard my cousin Jess calling my name in the particular voice she used when she had been sent to fetch me. I did not turn round. The hawthorn's branches made a shape against the sky like a question nobody had asked yet, and I found I wanted to hear the answer before I went back to being somebody's flower girl.

So I stayed, with my back to the wedding and my bare feet cold in the grass, and watched the orange moons turn, one slow loop after another, until the fiddle stopped and the lane filled with people calling my name. Even then I did not hurry.