Black outline drawing of a large star surrounded by curling swirls and small outlined stars, shown as a tattoo design on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Star with swirls and small stars design

Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a large five-pointed star outlined in bold black linework, overlapped by several curling swirl lines and five small outlined stars. The lines are uniform in weight with no shading. The image is black on white with no colour and no body placement shown.

Star Swirl Scroll Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sextant was cold enough to ache in Ada's palms, and Mr Hollis was still grumbling about the coal barge they had nearly run down off Finisterre. "Stop looking at the horizon like it owes you money," he said. "Find the star first. The sea will wait for you."

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She swung the arc until the bright one slid down to the edge of the water. Hollis had told her the star was the only thing aboard that never moved, though she had watched the chart table wobble for three weeks and doubted him. Behind the stern the wake curled white and looped away into the dark like a child's handwriting. Five small lights hung about the big one, pinpricks she could never name, and she had long since stopped trying.

The sight came out wrong by nearly four miles. Hollis frowned, then tapped the glass. "You took the wrong one. That's Vega, not the one I showed you." She had. Her eye had gone to the brightest light, and the brightest light had been drifting the whole time they talked, the way things do when you are pretending to be sure. She turned back and found the true star low over the bow, steady as a nail in a board.

At noon the next day they raised the coast of Brazil exactly where her pencil said it would. Hollis said nothing. He only handed her the logbook and a stub of pencil. She wrote the position, then in the margin, small and crooked, drew a five-pointed star with a loop of current curling out from it, and signed it with her own name.