Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Starburst tattoo on a shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop of a person wearing a white off-shoulder sweatshirt with purple shell prints, showing a black starburst design with a smaller star beside it on the shoulder. A small flower outline with a rounded centre sits on a finger of the hand just below. The ink is solid black linework with no shading, set against a plain brick wall and pale hair, and the face is out of frame.

Fine line Geometric Shoulder Hand Star Starburst Flower

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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

Sit down by the stove, the lot of you, and mind the coal scuttle. No, Dilys, the cat is not a footstool. Your grandfather's boat was the Ember Wren, and she carried coal from Stourport to Gloucester when the canal was still wet enough to drown a horse.

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One night in the lock at Tardebigge, with the water going down under us like a held breath, a star fell out of the sky and landed on the towpath with a hiss like a dropped iron. It was black as a stove lid and had six points sharp as a fish knife. Beside it lay a smaller one, a chip off the first. Nell Pilling, the lock keeper's girl, pocketed both before anybody could argue, and your grandfather, who was afraid of nothing except his mother-in-law, said she would live to regret it.

Nell wore the big star pinned to her shoulder under her shawl, and the little one she kept on a finger as a ring, a blossom pressed flat with a round centre. Every time the pound rose a hand's breadth, the blossom turned to face north, and the scallop shells that the lock keeper had mortared into the wall began to glimmer purple in the dark. She never told anyone what the star wanted, but the mud at the bottom of that lock was full of tiny starfish by spring.

When the frost came hard that winter, Nell walked the towpath at midnight and tipped both stars into the water. The Ember Wren went up through the lock that morning lighter than she had ever been, and she has never sunk since. So when you see a bargee tap the hull with two fingers before he goes under a bridge, that is what he is saying. Now bed. Dilys, the cat stays with the coal.