Fine line black and grey star constellation tattoo with dotted connecting lines on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Star constellation on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A cluster of small stars, most drawn as outlined five-point shapes with grey shading and some as simple dots, is linked by fine dotted lines to form a constellation. The linework is delicate and the stars are shaded in soft greys with no colour ink. The tattoo sits on the upper back near the shoulder blade, with a necklace and a dark ponytail partly visible beside it.

Fine line Back Constellation Star Dotted line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart table in the Corrie Halden smelled of lamp oil and wet wool, and Nell had been at it since the middle watch, pencil in one hand and the sextant tables open under the other. Mr Ferris had said the stars would not forgive a sloppy line. He said it every morning, tapping the dotted track on her slate with the stem of his pipe, as though the sky were a ledger she had signed for.

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Her first week she had only seen dots. Five bright ones in a crooked bowl, a scatter of pinpricks beside them, and somewhere far off a seventh that seemed to belong to nobody. Ferris made her join them with a hard pencil, never ruling, always by eye, until the shapes stopped being crowds and became a creature with its arms lifted or a pair of scales hung from a beam. "A line is only a promise," he said, "that the thing at one end is the same thing at the other."

On the night of the squall the cloud came down over the bow like a lid, and for four hours there was nothing overhead but black. Nell stood at the rail with her hands buried in her oilskin and said the shapes to herself, lifting each dot in turn the way Ferris had taught her. When the cloud finally tore, there they were, faint and certain, exactly where the dotted lines had told her they would be. She took the course from them and held it.

Ferris read her log at dawn and said nothing, which from him was praise. Then he took the slate, rubbed one of her lines out with his thumb, and drew it again, longer, bending round toward the east. "Now you know where it goes," he said.