Black outline stars of varying sizes trail from the nape of the neck down the upper back, with small sparkle marks among them.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Outline stars trailing down the upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a cascade of black outline stars, ranging from large to small, running down the centre of the upper back from the nape of the neck towards the shoulder blades. Small four-pointed sparkles and dots are scattered along the trail, some in lighter grey ink. The subject is photographed from behind with the arms raised and hands resting on the head, against a plain background.

Back Neck Star Sparkle Outline Trail

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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

Nobody at Seacombe Lodge ever asked Mr Hebden where he had come from, which suited him, and which suited us, because the rooms cost four and six a week and the sea air did the rest. He took the room above the scullery in the spring of 1951 and paid in advance, in coins he counted onto the hall table like a man laying out a hand of patience. My mother thought him a clerk. I thought him a liar, because he claimed he could name every star over the harbour wall, and nobody can.

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He proved it on the back stairs. Every evening after the teas were cleared he sat on the third step with a stub of carpenter's pencil and drew a star on the wallpaper beside the banister, then another beside that, a little trail climbing toward the landing. Big ones for the planets he swore were really planets, small ones for the fainter lights, and between them dots and tiny four-pointed glints that he said were the ones the mapmakers forgot. My mother scrubbed at them on Saturdays. He drew them again on Sunday.

He left in October without a word, the room stripped to bare boards and four and six sitting on the mantelpiece with a note that said only, Keep the stairs. I did not scrub them after that. I kept climbing past them each morning with the coal scuttle, and by Christmas I had learnt the Plough and the Pole Star from the trail alone, and was angry that I had needed him to teach me.

The last night of the year I took his pencil from the drawer and added one more star at the top of the stairs, a small one, just below the landing light. It was crooked, and it was the only one that was mine.