Black outline stars of varying sizes with small sparkles run down the upper back from the nape, on a woman with her arms raised.

Outline stars trailing down the upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A column of black outline stars descends from the nape of the neck down the centre of the upper back, with the largest star at the lower end. Small four-pointed sparkles are scattered between the stars, and the linework is consistent in weight. The ink is black on skin, shown in a plain, evenly lit photograph taken from behind.

Fine line Back Star Sparkle Trail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp at Skerrin Head had been dark for three nights when Bethan Coyle climbed the tower with a bucket of paraffin in one hand and her late husband's spectacles in her apron pocket. The gulls had gone quiet. Out past the skerries the Lily and the Ann Marie were beating home by guesswork, and nobody on the quay could say which of them would find the harbour mouth.

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The glass at the top was furred black with soot and the wick had burned down to a stub. She fed it what paraffin she had, struck the flint until her knuckles bled, and got nothing but the smell of scorched cotton. When she stepped out onto the gallery to shout down to the quay, the sky had cleared, and there they were: stars, thick as salt, and a line of them dropping from the high dark toward the water, the largest at the bottom, each one flanked by smaller specks that flickered like sparks off a smith's anvil.

Her husband used to say the sea kept a second light for keepers who ran short, and she had always laughed at him. She did not laugh now. She stood in the wind with her hair in her mouth and pointed down the line of stars, and on the quay the fishermen saw the column lean over the water and hold still. One by one they turned their bows toward it.

The boats came in on that line before midnight. Morning found the lamp burning, though the wick was still charred and nobody could say who had lit it. Bethan told the harbourmaster the stars had come down to help, and he nodded as though she had said something ordinary, which is how she knew he believed her.