Small grey star tattoo with a red centre on the wrist of a hand holding a black leather clutch.

Small star tattoo on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A close-up of a hand holding a black leather clutch, with a small star tattoo on the wrist. The star has a grey outline with a pinkish-red fill and fine, simple linework. The plain white backdrop and brown patterned fabric of the outfit sit behind the hand.

Fine line Forearm Star

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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

Sit closer, you, and mind the brazier, because the wind off the Tarn has teeth tonight. This is the tale of Oona Pellow, who kept the signal ledger at Harrowgate Relay when the sky was still full of satellites nobody had launched in a hundred years.

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Oona had one job: every night at the turn of the watch she climbed the mast and lit the red lamp that told the drifting barges where the shallows lay. The lamp was a small thing, a bulb of old glass no bigger than a plum stone, and it burned red because red was the only colour the shallows could be seen through the fog. Her grandmother had told her that the little red star inked on her own wrist was the same colour, a promise that a light could keep going if a hand kept faith with it.

One autumn the lamp failed. The fuel cell cracked in a storm, and the barge Mabry Dunn was carrying forty families across the flats came in blind. Oona had no spare glass, so she stripped the brass fittings from the ferry crane, scraped the old coating off her grandmother's reading lens, and worked until her fingers bled onto the coil. She lit the lamp at the third bell, and the barge turned.

Mabry Dunn never thanked her. He was too busy shouting at his children. But every year after, a child from that barge would bring Oona a red stone from the far shore, and she would set it on the sill, and the sill grew crowded. Now the sill is yours, and so is the ledger. Mind the red when you climb.