Two small colour starfish tattoos on forearms, one teal and one orange-red, photographed side by side.

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Matching starfish tattoos on forearms

Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two forearms are shown side by side, each with a small starfish tattoo. The starfish on the left is teal and green, and the one on the right is orange-red, both with defined outlines and soft shading on the arms. The background is dark and out of focus, with the arms filling most of the frame.

Forearm Starfish Pair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide had been out for three hours when Mags Tully found the second starfish, and she swore afterwards that it had been waiting for her under the wrack, arms curled tight the way the first one had been all winter. She lifted it with two fingers, the way her mother had taught her, and held it up to the grey light over Porthkerris harbour.

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The first was the colour of sea glass, a green so cold it looked painted on, and it had lived for six years in a chipped enamel basin by the gutter pipe at the back of her kitchen, where she fed it mussel meat on Sundays. The new one was orange as a lifeboat, bruised at one tip, and it would not settle in the basin at all. It kept reaching for the door. So on the Tuesday she carried both down the slipway in an old jam jar wrapped in a tea towel, and at the bottom step she stopped, because the water was already sliding up over her boots and she had not decided anything yet.

She set the green one on the weed at the lowest rock. It stayed. She set the orange one beside it, and for a long moment neither moved, two stars on a black ledge like punctuation nobody had written. Then the orange arm lifted, touched the green, and they began to walk the same slow way, out towards the open water, one leg at a time.

Mags went back up the slipway with an empty jar and wet hems. The basin stayed empty all that summer, and she found she did not mind, because every low tide she walked the rocks and found, once, two orange stars tucked together under the same stone, and once a green one with a bright new arm, as if the sea had been keeping their accounts for them.