Black line drawing sheet of four star and swirl tattoo designs on white paper, with outlined and filled stars linked by curling flourishes.

Star and swirl tattoo design sheet

Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of four black ink line drawings of star designs with curling swirls and scrolls. The designs range from stacked outlined stars and a sprig of small stars to a single star with double lines and a long, flowing spiral of filled and open stars. The drawings are in black ink only, set apart on a plain white background.

Star Swirl Scroll Flourish Spiral Outline

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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

Now, you'll want to hear this with your glasses off, because the stars don't care for spectacles, and neither did Bethan Rowe's father when Tom asked for her hand. Sit down, Tom, the bread's not going anywhere. The sky over Cardigan Bay had been scattered with stars that March, the kind that look close enough to pick like sloes, and the two of them were out on the pier at midnight counting them, which is how you know a courtship is serious.

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Bethan had a habit of drawing whatever she saw. She filled the backs of the chapel hymn sheets with stars, five points apiece, and then she gave them curls, so they looked caught in a wind off the sea. Her mother said she'd never settle. Old Ifor the ferryman said a star with a tail is a star that's leaving, and he wasn't wrong. When the boat Gwenllian went down past the headland that autumn, the only thing the tide gave back was a sheet of paper with one star on it, spiralling, as if someone had unrolled it across the water.

Tom went out after the drowned men every morning for a month, and every morning he came home with a paper star, a little wetter, folded smaller than the last. He tucked them in his coat. On the day of the wedding he stood at the chapel door with forty of them in his breast pocket and the wind coming up the lane, and he could not for the life of him remember which way the swirls were meant to turn.

So Bethan took his hand, turned his palm up, and drew the first curl on it with her finger. Left to right, she said, the way the tide goes out. Then she shook the whole pocketful loose over the wall, and the wind carried them up the lane in a long bright spiral, filled and open, all the way to the church gate. Go on, now. Your turn to tell it.