Two small black fine line asterisk tattoos on the inner forearms of two people, held close together side by side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching asterisk tattoos on two forearms

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two small asterisk tattoos sit on the inner forearms of two people whose arms rest together against a dark background. Each mark is built from thin, single black lines with no shading, and the two designs are nearly identical in size and shape. The soft, neutral lighting and the patterned top at the upper edge keep the focus on the skin and the matching placement.

Fine line Forearm Asterisk Star Matching

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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

The lamp had guttered low by the time I finished the column, and my fingers were stained to the second knuckle with lampblack. I had been set to copy the Psalms for the master's library in Caesarea, but I had been told to keep the text honest. Wherever a line stood in one scroll and not in the other, I drew a small star beside it, six strokes crossing at the middle, so that whoever read after us would know the words had been added from elsewhere and not lost.

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My friend Philomena worked the other bench, by the window where the harbour light came in grey and thin. We quarrelled about most things, but never about the stars. She said a mark a reader could see was a kindness. I said a mark that could be scraped away was a lie told gently. Still we drew them on the same lines, on the same days, until the master could no longer tell whose reed had made which.

The winter the fever came off the ships, Philomena went to the sickhouse to read to the dying and did not come back to her bench. I found her last sheet in the basket under the cloths, a passage from Lamentations with a star drawn so fine it was almost a breath on the vellum. Beneath it she had written one word in her cramped, leaning hand: kept.

I have kept it. When I copy now I still make my six strokes beside every borrowed line, and at the foot of each column I leave a small space, the width of a thumb, where I write nothing at all. The master takes it for a fault in my work. The next reader may look closer and see what the stars were guarding.