Black and grey shaded tattoo of five-pointed stars in varying sizes running diagonally across the upper chest near the collarbone.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shaded stars across the upper chest

Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A cluster of five-pointed stars runs diagonally across the upper chest, with the largest star at the centre and smaller ones arranged around it. The stars are rendered with soft grey shading and dark edges, giving them a raised, dimensional look against the skin. The tattoo is shown in black and grey only, with the subject framed from the shoulder down to the neckline of a white top with coloured polka dots.

Chest Star

Find an artist for this

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

Thomas Rudd had been told to leave out the fourth star. The instruction came folded inside a damp envelope with the chart order: Hull to the Baltic, a clean sheet, no more than the sun and the Pole. But the fourth star in the cluster off the Dogger line had been sighted by his late wife's brother, and the captain wanted it gone before the insurers saw the plate.

Keep reading

Thomas did not argue. He took his graphite stump and his bone burnisher to the proof and worked the stars the old way, shading each dark edge until the paper seemed to lift. The large one at the centre he lit from the lower left, as he always did, so it stood proud of the sheet. The fourth he left unfinished, a faint grey bloom with no points to it, the kind of smudge a careless sleeve leaves across wet ink.

The captain came down the next morning with his coat still wet from the quay. He ran a thumb over the cluster and frowned at the smudge. "That's a flaw in the plate," he said. "Burnish it out." Thomas told him the copper would not take it, that the mark lay in the grain and had been there since the first proof, which was mostly a lie. The grain had nothing to do with it.

The captain studied the bloom for a long while. Then he laid his palm flat over the sheet, covering it, and said nothing at all. Thomas printed three hundred charts that week, and every one carried the star the captain could not bear to look at, shaded so softly that it showed only when the lamplight came in low across the table.