Black and white photo of a fine line tattoo of small stars and dots on the inner forearm, with a dark top visible at the edge of the frame.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small star cluster on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm with a small cluster of black star tattoos and scattered dots running diagonally across the skin. The stars are drawn with fine, sharp lines and a few have tiny radiating points, while the dots are very small and spaced loosely. The black and white photograph is softly lit, with the arm filling the frame against a pale background and a dark garment on the right.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Star Dot Constellation

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dai Pritchard had the lamp in one hand and the tally board in the other when the cage jammed at the three-hundred-foot mark. The banksman's voice came down the shaft thin as wire to say it would be an hour, maybe two. Dai leaned against the timber and took out the folded wage slip he kept in his waistcoat. On the back, in his daughter's pencil, were seven stars and a scatter of dots running off the corner like spilt coal.

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Nia had drawn it the winter the strike ended, sitting at the kitchen table with her tongue between her teeth. "That one's Gwen," she'd said, pointing at the brightest star, "and those are the ones who went to Cardiff and never wrote." He had laughed and told her the dots were too small to be names. She had insisted they counted. She was eleven then. Now she was writing from a nursing school in Bristol, and the wage slip was the only thing he had of her handwriting that was not a postcard.

The cage shuddered and began to rise. At the top the air smelled of wet slate and then, all at once, of cold clean night. Dai stepped off the platform and looked up. The sky over the colliery was clearer than he had seen it in months, and there, low in the east, were the seven stars, sharp as pin pricks, with the dots trailing away from them exactly as she had drawn.

He did not go home. He walked to the post office on Commercial Street where the telephone box was lit, fed it coins, and rang Bristol. When Nia answered he said only, "I can see them now. The little ones too." She was quiet for a moment, and then he heard her laugh, and he understood she had been awake at her window all along, counting.