Colourful black-outlined stars in red, green, blue, purple and yellow cascade across the hip and lower abdomen, with a navel piercing visible above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Multicoloured star cluster on the hip

Other · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows a close view of a torso with a large central star outlined in black and filled with green, flanked by smaller stars in red, blue, yellow, purple and orange that trail up and to the left. The stars use bold solid outlines and flat colour fills with no visible shading. The composition is cropped to the midriff, with a blue fabric edge at the bottom of the frame and a navel piercing above the design.

Other Star Navel piercing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been told never to go near the vats after dark, but the moon has climbed over the dye-yard wall and the stone troughs hold it like coins. Your master Amos has gone up the coast to Sidon with the purple cloth, and he has left you the ledger, the oil lamp and thirteen clay pots of pigment that must be sorted by shade before the caravan comes at first light. Twelve are easy. The thirteenth is the green the temple women asked for, mixed from weld and a pinch of ground malachite, and it sulks in the cold, so you keep it close to your chest like a sleeping cat.

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You name the colours to yourself while you work, the way Amos taught you. Red for the star hanging low over the fish market. Yellow for the bright one that never blinks. Orange like a spill of embers, blue like the water under the harbour wall, purple for the one that only shows when the wind has cleaned the air. You line the pots up on the sill in the order they would fall across a painted cloth, and you are pleased with yourself until your elbow catches the green one and it tips.

It does not spill into a puddle. It runs in a single bright line across the flagstones toward the door, then breaks into a cluster of drops that spread and set as they travel, each one a little rounder than the last. You stand there with your heart knocking while the lamp hisses. In the morning Amos counts thirteen pots and finds them all whole, then sees the trail on the stone and goes very quiet.

He kneels beside the largest drop and studies it for a long while. Then he hands you the finest brush from the rack and says that the sky has already sketched the cloth for you. The small stars go first, he says, scattered as the spill was scattered. The big one goes last, in the middle, where the lamp would hang if you were hanging a lamp, and you must paint its black edge before you fill it, so that the green has somewhere to stay.