Black and white photo of a small black circular emblem with a six-pointed star and flame-like swirls on the side of a woman's torso below her raised arm.

Star and flame emblem on a side torso

Geometric · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with long dark hair holds her hair with one hand, her arm raised, and her face is out of frame. A small black tattoo of a circular emblem sits on her side below the armpit, with a six-pointed star at its centre and flame-like scrollwork around the ring. The image is monochrome with soft shading and a blurred grey background that keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Geometric Ribs Star Emblem Circle Flame Swirl Hair

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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

Tobias Wenn had cut seals for the river towns of Halvery for thirty years, and he could tell a forger's hand from a true one by the way the flame curled at its tail. The star was easy. Six points, two triangles laid one over the other, a thing any boy could scratch with a nail. The ring of fire around it was what the Chancery paid for, and what the clerks checked.

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The letter came in March with a broken wax seal and a rider who would not sit down. Lord Aubrey of Carrow wanted a new die cut by dusk, because the Queen's own signet had been taken on the Dunmere road. Tobias worked under the lamp with his apprentice, Mireille, who was nine and had the steadiest hand in the shop. She cut the scrollwork while he watched the clock. When she finished the ring, she had swept the flame to the left, away from the star, where Tobias's own master had always swept it right.

He almost struck it out. Instead he pressed the die into clay, then into wax, and held the impression up to the lamp. A forger would have kept the fire turning the old way, because clerks knew that by heart. Mireille had copied nothing. She had made the flame turn back on itself, the way the water did below the mill wheel. It would pass a clerk's eye and fail a soldier's.

At dawn the rider returned, read the impression, and grinned without quite meaning to. Tobias kept the wrong die on the shelf for years afterwards. When Mireille asked why he had let it leave the shop, he only said the lamp had been good that night.