Solid black blackwork tattoo of a silhouetted girl with a ponytail and full dress holding a sparkler, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Girl silhouette with sparkler on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a girl with a ponytail and a full, flared dress, holding a small starburst sparkler in one hand. The shapes are filled with dense black ink with smooth edges and no outline, and the figure stands against plain skin. The photograph is black and white and shows the tattoo on the outer upper arm, with a dark top at the edge of the frame.

Blackwork Upper arm Girl Silhouette Dress Starburst

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's cotton dress is too long, so you knot the hem into your fist and climb the sea wall with the sparkler you took from the Co-op drawer. Below you the harbour is the colour of wet slate, and the lamps along the quay have started buzzing on one by one. Nobody told you to come up here. Nobody had to. Everyone in Skerrow knows the fleet comes home by the light on the wall, and everyone knows the wall belongs to children when the men are out past the Ness.

Keep reading

Your brother Daniel is somewhere beyond the breakwater with the Ellen Mary and eleven other boats. You have been counting them all afternoon from the window of the chip shop, the way you count stairs in the dark. Twelve hulls went out at dawn. Twelve should come back on the flood. The fog came in sideways at four o'clock and swallowed the lighthouse, and that was when your aunt said the word wait in the voice she uses for things that are already decided.

You strike the sparkler on the box. It spits white and you hold it out over the water, arm up, and draw a slow figure of eight the way Daniel taught you, so the fog has something to look at. The sparks throw small stars on the wet stone. The stick is half gone when the horn sounds, low and off to the left, and then another answers it, and then the lamp at the Ness flickers once as if someone is climbing the tower with a torch.

The first hull out of the murk is not the Ellen Mary. It is the Patience, whose skipper was meant to be ashore with his leg in plaster. You let the last of the sparkler fall. It goes out in the sea with a long hiss, and you stand on the wall with your arm still raised, waiting for the rest of them to follow the light home.