Black and grey nautical star design with zebra stripe shading inside and the script words Class of '08 beneath it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Nautical star with zebra stripes

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A bold five-pointed star drawn in solid black with a bevelled, shaded edge that gives it a three-dimensional look. Its centre is filled with a zebra-stripe pattern in black and white, and the script lettering Class of '08 sits along the lower edge. The design is shown on a plain white background with no body part visible.

Traditional Star Script lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had been painting roses on narrowboats for eleven years when the headmaster's widow brought her a photograph of a black star and asked for it to go on the stern of a boat that had never been to sea. "It's for the boys," she said, which Nell took to mean the boys in the photograph, all of whom were now forty and arguing about pensions.

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The star had come from a leavers' jumper, the kind of thing a class draws together in the last week of Year 11, when the teachers have stopped pretending. Somebody had shaded the points so they looked lifted off the page. Somebody else had filled the middle with zebra stripes, because the school's mascot was a zebra in a rugby shirt nobody could explain. Nell asked who had drawn it. "Dennis Quaile," said the widow. "He wanted to join the merchant navy. Cried when the form came back saying he couldn't swim well enough."

Nell painted it at dawn on the towpath at Lymm, lettering the year along the bottom in a curl she had learned from her grandfather's signwriting. The black took three coats. The stripes she did last, with a rigger brush and a steady hand, and when she stepped back the star seemed to tilt towards the water as if it were looking for its bearings.

The widow came down with a flask and stood on the lock beam for a long time. Then she said the boat would be called Dennis, after all, and Nell painted that under the star too, smaller, so nobody on the canal could miss it.