Black and grey tattoo of shaded stars with swirling linework running down the ribs, with a smaller star tattoo lower on the hip.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Star and swirl tattoos on ribs and hip

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's side torso shows a column of shaded black and grey stars joined by curling swirls, running from the ribs downward. A smaller star with ornamental scrollwork sits lower on the hip above the waistband of her jeans. The soft grey shading and light flourishes are set against bare skin, with a white top lifted at the upper edge of the frame.

Ribs Other Star Swirl Scroll

Find an artist for this

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

Brother Anselm had been told the ink would not last the winter, and he had kept the vellum dry under his habit anyway, because the abbot had asked for the new star chart by Candlemas and nothing else in the scriptorium mattered as much. He sat at the sloping desk with the shutter propped on a stick, working by the grey light off the fens, while the bell for Lauds rang twice across the water.

Keep reading

The chart was meant to be sober. The abbot wanted the constellations set true, each star a small ringed point, and the twelve signs ruled in red. But Anselm had been copying from an old Arabic table that a travelling physician left behind, and in its margins someone long dead had drawn stars that were not in the sky at all: five-pointed, shaded on one side, trailing curls like smoke from a candle snuffed too quickly. Anselm had spent three nights deciding whether they were errors or prayers.

On the fourth morning Brother Wulfric came in stamping snow from his boots and found him with the brush in hand, adding a shadow to a star that was not in the chart. "The abbot will see that," Wulfric said. "He will," Anselm said. "I want him to ask me what it is." He set the brush down and turned the vellum so the light fell across the curl of ink. Wulfric leaned in, squinted, and for once said nothing at all.