Black and grey fine line tattoo of a row of small stars decreasing in size across the inside of a wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Row of stars on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a wrist with a row of small five-pointed stars in black ink, arranged in a gentle curve and shrinking in size towards the end. The linework is fine and the stars are lightly shaded, with soft natural light on the skin. The hand is raised and out of focus in the background against a plain pale backdrop.

Fine line Forearm Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart was still pinned above the kettle when Mam finally let me take it down, its corners gone soft from years of steam. Grandad had drawn it in carpenter's pencil on the back of an old tide table: seven dots in a curve running from the harbour wall out past the bar. Each dot had a name in his square capitals. ORION was crossed out. Someone, probably him, had written FOG in biro beside the last one, with an arrow.

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He taught me the trick on the slipway the summer I was nine, when the boats were still wooden and the men shouted across the water in Cornish when they thought nobody else could follow. "The big ones will lose you," he said, thumbing the lamp on and off. "Take the small ones at the end. Each one points to the next, and the last one tells you you're nearly in." I thought he was making it up. I thought stars were for wishing on, and I said so, and he laughed until he had to sit down on a coil of rope.

The night the Mary Ellen failed to come round the point, the fog sat on Porthgwen like a wet sheet. Nobody would take a boat out, so I went down the slipway alone with the chart in my coat and a torch I wasn't allowed to use. I found the curve by counting the way he'd shown me, big stars first, then the small ones, until the seventh was barely a speck against the grey. I walked toward it, step by step, and the fog thinned at the bar. A single light swung round the point, then another, and I heard oars knocking on the rowlocks.

They towed her in at half past three. Mam wrapped me in a blanket while Grandad swore at the winch. I still count the stars when I can't sleep, big ones first, and I always finish on the last one, which is only a speck if you look straight at it.