Small black and metallic star tattoos scattered across a woman's shoulder, collarbone and upper arm, with a sunburst pendant necklace.

Scattered stars on shoulder and upper arm

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop of a woman's upper chest, shoulder and upper arm, showing small star shapes in black with some gold and silver metallic accents. The stars cluster near the collarbone and shoulder and trail in a loose line along the upper arm. The ink is solid and simple, with no shading, and the warm skin tones and white top sit against a soft, blurred background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada used to say the stars over the spoil heaps were lamps the dead had left burning on their way down, and I believed her until I was nine and found out she only said it to stop me crying at the pit gates. Still, I kept counting them. Every night my brother Tom went down at ten, and every night I stood on the back step with a stub of pencil and wrote the number on the inside of my wrist, because ink from the ledger got on my fingers and Mam hated that.

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The night the wind came off the north sea and the sky went hard and clear, I counted forty-one. Then a cloud pushed over the headgear and I lost my place, and when it cleared there were thirty-nine, and I could not for the life of me say which two had gone. Mrs Pryce next door said that was the sort of arithmetic that got girls married off to the bookmaker's clerk. I laughed, but my hands were shaking on the sill.

Tom came up in the cage at twenty past five, black to the eyes and grinning like a fool, because a roof fall had missed his cart by a yard. He said the shift boss had seen three lamps go out on the far face and called it a bad air day. I asked him to stand still while I counted the specks of soot on his neck. He thought that was daft, but he let me.

Forty-one, I told him, and it was the only true thing I had written all week. Then the sun came up over the heap and the stars went out one by one, as they always do, and I rubbed the figures off my wrist with my thumb and went to put the kettle on.

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