Small fine line black tattoo of eight-pointed stars and dots scattered across the inside of a forearm, photographed indoors.

Scattered stars and dots on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a pale forearm with a scattered group of small black tattoos, made up of several eight-pointed stars and a number of tiny solid dots. The linework is thin and crisp, with no shading, and the marks are spaced irregularly across the skin in a loose, constellation-like arrangement. The ink is entirely black on a light skin tone, and the background shows a car interior and a knitted fabric edge.

Fine line Forearm Star Dot Constellation Night sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ward 9, 03:40. Mrs Okafor's drip ran dry twice before midnight, so I have spent most of the shift listening to the pump alarm and a biro that skips on every second word. Dev, in bed four, asked me to stop by the window and count the stars. I counted three. The car park lights, I told him, wash out the rest, and he said that was the car park's fault and not the sky's.

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He wanted them drawn, so I tore a corner off a meal-request form and gave him my pen. He made eight-pointed stars with the care of someone signing a cheque, and between them he scattered small solid dots, because, he said, dots are stars that are too far off to bother with. His grandad told him that in a caravan in Whitby, the summer before the stroke. Dev is nine and has decided his grandad is still out past the cloud, checking the dots one by one.

At six the day staff arrived with their coats still zipped, and the consultant asked why a drawing was taped to the observation chart. I said it was a map. Dev said it was a list, and that the dots had to be named before handover so nobody lost track of them. I wrote the first one in pencil. Mrs Okafor is Fenwick, he decided, and the dot nearest the kettle is Whitby. On the bus home, with the sky over the ring road going the colour of wet slate, I counted what I could see, got two, and suspected the list was still missing a few.