Black and grey tattoo of shaded stars of varying sizes, with small sparkle marks, rising in a trail up the middle of a bare back.

Star trail running down the spine

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a bare back showing a column of stars that runs from the base of the neck down towards the lower back, following the spine. The stars range from large to small, with outlined shapes and grey shading that fades within some of them, and small four-pointed sparkle marks are scattered between them. The image is black and white, and the composition is centred so the whole trail is visible.

Back Star Sparkle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Late August, and the orchard behind the press house smelled of bruised windfalls. Uncle Tomas tipped his head back against the bench and said, "Count them, Nell. Don't wish. Just count." So she lay on the cold grass with her knees up and watched the dark over the Bramley tree.

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The first one came high and quick, then another followed it, and then a whole chain of them slid down the sky towards the far wall. The big ones burned slow and left a smear behind them. The small ones were hardly there at all, just scratches of light that vanished before she could finish saying the number. Forty-one, she reckoned, before the sky went quiet. Tomas said the old pickers called them the orchard's windfalls, and that the last one always dropped over the gate where the lane runs down to the millpond.

She wanted to see where it landed, so they went down with the torch, grass soaking their boots. Past the gate the ditch was full of fallen fruit, pale as lanterns in the beam. The millpond held one star exactly, trembling on the black water. Tomas crouched and dipped a finger in the pond and said nothing lands, not really. The light just keeps going, and you only catch the bit that falls in front of you.

Next morning Nell found the cider ledger on the press house shelf and, in pencil, counted the windfalls again. She drew them as they had fallen: the big ones sharp, the small ones barely dots, all running in a crooked line down the page until it ran off the edge of the paper.