Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shooting stars with swirling trails

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows several five-pointed stars of varying sizes, with the largest stars at the centre and smaller stars scattered along curling, ribbon-like trails. The linework is dark and confident, with soft grey shading on the stars and along the swirls that gives them volume. The design is shown on a plain white background, with the swirls sweeping from the lower left up to the top right.

Star Swirl Scroll Trail

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

The frost had got into the water trough again, so Mabry broke it with the heel of the shovel while the dogs watched from the byre door. Her father said the stars were pinned to the sky and would not come loose, and she believed him until the night the big one fell over Hollin Edge.

Keep reading

It came down slantwise, dragging ribbons of light that curled back on themselves like wool off a carding comb, and dropped into the top field beyond the wall where the hoar lay thickest. Mabry took the lantern and went out in her nightdress and boots. She found it in the furrow, a five-pointed thing no bigger than a loaf, giving off heat the way a kettle does just before it sings. Its edges were grey and soft, as if someone had rubbed charcoal into them with a thumb.

Her grandmother used to say that fallen stars only wanted a warm place to be useful, so Mabry wrapped it in a sack that had held seed barley and carried it home against her chest. In the kitchen it tapped against the table leg like a moth at a window. It wanted its trails back, she understood at last, and it would not settle until it had them.

She drew them for it on the back of the feed ledger in pencil, long swirling lines rising from the bottom corner to the top, and shaded them with her fingertip until they looked like something that could bear weight. The star climbed onto the page, settled into the largest of the drawn stars, and went still.

In the morning the trough was clear to the bottom. Above the byre door, on the beam beside the old horseshoe, a single star glowed faintly through the grey light, and the ledger lay open on the kitchen table with its trails sweeping up the page toward the window.