Small realistic starfish tattoo in brown and grey shading on the leg, partly covered by clear aftercare film.

Small shaded starfish tattoo on a leg

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small five-pointed starfish sits at the centre of the frame on a leg, with a faint pinkish healing tone around it. The starfish has dark outlines, soft grey and brown shading along each arm and a lighter central highlight that gives it some dimension. The clear plastic aftercare film covers much of the surrounding skin, and the plain background keeps the tattoo as the focus.

Realism Other Starfish Sea creature

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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

Mae kept the starfish in a jam jar on the wheelhouse sill, wedged between a tin of metal polish and a cracked saucer, and every time the Cassandra bumped through a lock she heard it knock against the glass. Her father said it was dead and should go over the side at the next bridge. She hadn't argued, but she hadn't thrown it either.

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It had come from a biscuit tin in Shoreham, one of the rockpool finds her grandmother Ivy had kept in a kitchen drawer for half a century. Ivy had died in March, and the tin had arrived with the boat papers, a sealed bag of pebbles, a bleached crab claw and the starfish, which had lost one arm to some old accident and grown a blunt stub in its place. Mae counted the points through the glass every morning, five, always five, as if the number might change if she stopped checking.

At Cosgrove the lock keeper leaned over the gate and asked what she was carrying that smelt so strongly of salt. Something from the sea, she said, and he laughed and told her the canal went nowhere near the sea. She thought of Ivy at the sink, sleeves pushed up, saying everything ends up in the sea in the end, love, it just takes the long way round. Mae unscrewed the lid, lifted the starfish out on a wet fingertip and set it on the sill where the sun could reach it.

By Milton Keynes the water had turned the colour of strong tea and the starfish had gone stiff and grey, but the centre still held a pale patch like a thumbprint on a window. At the next bridge Mae tipped the jar over the rail. The star went down slowly, arms spread, turning once before the brown water closed over it, and she stood there until the boat had drifted clear of the arch and there was nothing left to watch.