Black and grey tattoo flash design of five shaded stars linked by a swirling vine on a white background, with no body placement shown.

Greyscale stars trailing a curling vine

Black and grey · Flash

A digital drawing of five large and several small stars arranged diagonally along a black vine with curled tendrils. The stars have bevelled edges and soft grey gradient shading, with bold black outlines. The design is shown in greyscale on a plain white background with the subject centred and fully visible.

Star Vine Tendril Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had got into the hop-yard again by the time Dad sent me out with the lantern, so I walked the old wire fence instead, counting posts by feel through my gloves. Above the hill the sky had gone the colour of wet slate, and then, one at a time, the stars came out over Hollin Farm as if someone were unpinning them from a board.

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The bramble vine along the top rail had not been cut back since Gran died. Its woody stems curled off into the hedge in long tendrils, and where the gate hung crooked on its hinge, the vine had wound itself round the iron like it meant to keep the gate shut for good. I held the lantern close and found a pale knot of seed heads, dry as paper. Gran used to say stars were only seeds that had broken loose from something bigger and climbed out of the dark to find the light.

I had promised Dad I would clear the rail before the ewes started lambing. Instead I cut one long length of vine and carried it up to the house, its thorns snagging my sleeves. Dad was at the kitchen table with his boots off and the wireless murmuring about fog on the motorway. He didn't scold me. He took the cutting, looked at it for a while, and hung it on the nail above the range where Gran used to dry her herbs.

In the morning there was rime on every post. The cut stem had a single seed head furred silver with frost, and when the light came up over the ridge, three stars were still hanging in the pale sky above the hop-yard.