Small five-pointed star tattoo with a pink fill and dark blue outline on the inner wrist, shown against a wooden table.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small pink and blue star on the wrist

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small five-pointed star sits on the inner wrist, with a pale pink fill and a dark blue outline and a faint yellowish edge around it. The linework is simple and solid, and the fill looks flat rather than shaded. The photograph is taken close up at an angle, with the hand resting at the bottom edge and a wooden surface behind the arm.

Forearm Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the pan. You want the story of the star over Scalloway? Then you'll have it straight, because I was stirring the porridge when it came up.

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It was the February of the bad year, and the Margaret Ann was twelve hours out with her hold half full and the galley stove running on the last of the paraffin. Old Dougie Strachan swore it was the blackest night he'd known, the sort where sea and sky shake hands and you can't tell which is which. Then, low on the port bow, a star came up that had no business being there. Five points, sharp as a fishhook, and not white. Pink, the colour of the inside of a shell, with a rim of blue round it, as if someone had gone over it with a crayon to keep it in place.

Nobody on deck could name it. The skipper said it was a flare from the Ellen Rae, which was already on the bottom by then. I said nothing, because I'd seen the same star pinned to a child's mitten the week before and that's what I was thinking of. Forty minutes we steered by it. It didn't blink the way the lighthouse did. It just sat there, steady, until the cloud tore open and there was Noss Head plain as a tooth.

Here's the part I never told the skipper. When I went down to the galley after, the kettle was still warm, and the salt on the window over the sink had a clean round patch the size of a palm, as though someone had pressed a hand there to look out. I didn't ask who. Some nights you don't ask. Now pass the bread.