Small colour tattoo of a yellow star with a purple centre, a black hairbrush and a yellow hairbrush on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Star and two hairbrushes on an arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

Three small separate motifs sit on the skin: a yellow star with a purple centre at the lower left, a black hairbrush angled up to the right, and a yellow hairbrush beside it. The linework is simple and dark around the black brush, with soft purple shading behind the yellow brush. Colour is mostly yellow and orange with purple and black accents on a plain, lightly lit background.

Upper arm Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hall smells of floor polish and warm sausage rolls, and across the room someone is holding up a name badge with a photo so unflattering that you laugh before you can read it. You had sworn you would not come, then Marnie texted at six to say she had kept the brushes. Two of them, wrapped in a tea towel inside the biscuit tin she had been hiding under the stage since the Lower Sixth, when the girls in Ashdown House shared one cracked mirror and a ration of hairgrips.

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She is by the squash table now, greyer at the temples, turning a carrier bag over in her hands. Inside is a black paddle brush with a split cushion and a yellow one missing three teeth. Taped to the handle is the gold foil star you cut from a Christmas card in 1998 and stuck inside your locker door, the one the caretaker scraped off with a Stanley knife. "You said we'd never be the kind of women who needed a shared brush," she says. "We were fourteen. You were very certain."

The rule back then was simple. Whoever was brushing at the window when the bell went had to tell the truth, and you had told her about the flat in Leeds and the fights through the wall, and she had told you about the boy at the bus stop who was never really a boy. Now the room fills with people singing the school song half a beat behind the piano, and you take the black brush, still knotted with a hair that was never yours, and feel the old weight of it settle in your palm.

Marnie tips the star out of the bag. It is curling at one point and still bright, still the only thing either of you ever managed to keep.