Black and grey tattoo of outlined stars with soft shaded streaks across the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shooting stars across a upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows several outlined five-pointed stars of varying sizes, left unfilled, with smaller dark dots scattered between them. Soft grey and faint reddish shading streaks diagonally downward from the stars, suggesting motion. The image is a close crop of bare skin on the upper back and shoulder, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Back Shoulder Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mother Ardith swore the stars over Carrick Pier fell in the autumn, the year the dance hall burned down, and that the lot of them came down at once like sparks off a blacksmith's hammer. Nobody believed her but the fishermen, who had seen the sky split above the harbour lights and had sworn off the Saturday dances after. You want to know why the hall was never rebuilt, I'll tell you that is why. The gap where it stood filled up with nettles and a few hollow stars of tin that the boys hung off the railings to catch the moon.

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Young Tom Kearney was the one who went looking. He was sixteen and daft about a girl who sold cockles on the front, and he reckoned a star that had fallen into the sea would still be warm enough to melt the cold out of a man's hands. So he took a lantern and a bag of bread and walked the tide line for three nights, following the grey scrapes the stars had left on the sand, which ran off in long diagonal smears toward the headland like the drag marks of something that did not want to go.

On the third night he found the stars sitting on the rocks, five of them, flat and white and perfectly still, their points sharp enough to cut a finger. He lifted the largest one. It was cold as a church step. Then, very quietly, the sea behind him went dark and the smaller specks scattered across the wet stone flared up like cinders, and he understood that they had not fallen at all. They had been thrown, and they were only waiting for someone brave enough to carry them back up to the sky.

He carried the big one home under his coat. The cockle girl married a sailor. Tom never did tell anyone what he did with the star, except that it hangs now above the empty dance floor, and when the fishing boats come in late you can see the streaks of it on the water.