Black fine line constellation tattoo of connected stars across the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Star constellation tattoo on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a constellation tattoo on the upper back, close to the shoulder blade. Thin black lines link solid black five-point stars of varying sizes in a loose, open arrangement. The ink is black on skin with a soft blurred purple object at the top left, and the composition is tightly framed on the tattoo.

Fine line Back Constellation Star

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

The petrol gauge had been lying to us since Barstow, so Dad pulled onto the verge at the mile marker and cut the engine. The desert came in through the open windows, cold and smelling of hot dust, and he pointed up through the windscreen at a scatter of light. See the fellow with the bent arm? Then the dog at his heel, that bright one. Those are the bits people argue about. I was fourteen and bored, and I said the stars looked like someone had spilled them.

Keep reading

He didn't laugh. He licked his thumb and drew on the glass, joining one dot to the next in the grey film of our fingerprints: a hunter's shoulder, a line down to a knee, a long thin arm that ended in a single bright point. The lines were the only part that wasn't really there. The sky had no strings in it. He said the old people made them up so they could find their way home and tell their children where they'd been.

At the petrol station in the morning the attendant sold us two litres of water and a map that was already out of date. Dad bought a pencil and spent the whole drive to the coast tracing the hunter onto the back of a receipt, going over the joins until the paper tore. When I asked why he kept going over the same lines, he said that was the only way to be sure which stars belonged together.

I still have that receipt. The pencil has rubbed grey on the side of my hand for years, and every time I open the drawer I see the thin lines and the small black stars I drew after him, one dot to the next, all the way to the end of the arm where the sky goes on without us.