Black star tattoo trailing from the wrist across the back of a hand towards the fingers, with small dots between the stars.

Star trail tattoo across the back of a hand

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A cascade of small black stars and tiny dots runs from the wrist down the back of the hand and along the index finger, with the largest stars near the wrist and the smallest near the fingertips. The stars are solid filled shapes with crisp edges and the dots are fine, giving a scattered, drifting effect. The ink is black on light skin against a plain black background, and soft blurred patches cover part of the wrist.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bus shelter on Tannery Road had lost its glass again, so Nan and I sat on the cold bench under the sodium lamp and counted what the council had left of the sky. Three over the gasworks if you didn't blink. Nan said the rest had gone behind the new flats, which was fair, because the flats had got into everything else.

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She had a knack for it, the way other people have a knack for knitting. She would take my hand, turn it palm down on her knee, and walk her fingers from wrist to knuckle, naming each light as she went. The big ones first, she said, because they were the ones that made the trail. Then the little dots, which you had to be patient for. Her own mother had done it to her in a house with a coal fire, where in winter the sky came down the chimney.

The night the buses stopped for the strike, she reached the index finger and went quiet. Her hand had gone very still on mine. I asked what the last one was called, and she said it had no name, it was only the one you could see if you were already falling asleep. So I pressed my fingertip down on her knee and waited. A siren went past toward the river, and then, faint as a dropped stitch, there was a light where the finger ended. There, Nan said. That's the one. I believed her, and I still do.

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