Fine line black starburst tattoo of radiating rays with dotted tips on the upper arm, with a hand and ring resting beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Starburst tattoo on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small starburst is tattooed on the outer upper arm, made of thin black lines radiating from a dense central point. The rays taper and end in small dots, giving a delicate, hand-drawn feel. The arm rests on a pale marble surface against a dark background, with the tattoo placed near the centre of the frame.

Fine line Dotwork Upper arm Starburst Sunburst Ray Star Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fret came down on the Dogger like wet wool, and by four the lamp in the wheelhouse was the only thing I trusted. Skipper Ruddock had the binnacle unscrewed on the chart table, its glass cracked across one corner, and he kept tapping the brass with a thumbnail as if it might tell him something.

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'The lines go out in every direction,' he said, 'so you can never lose the middle.' He'd drawn it years back on the back of a fag packet: a dot, a ring of strokes, each one ending in a speck where the pen had lifted. Ferris, the youngest of us, said it looked like a dandelion clock someone had sneezed on. Ruddock didn't laugh. He said when the lights of the other boats smeared out, you steered by whichever way the rays pointed back to.

Near two the fret thinned for a minute. We saw the Cromer light sweep past, then nothing, then a red flare spat from the fleet behind us and burst into a ring of sparks that hung in the air and fell apart into dots. Ruddock got a hand on the wheel, held the bearing on the centre of that burst, and brought us round into the harbour mouth with the nets still streaming and the sea hissing off the rail.

Ferris asked him later, with the kettle on, why he kept that scrap of packet folded in his oilskin after thirty years when he could have had the thing done properly. Ruddock smoothed the crease with his thumb and said a man only needs one mark he can't lose at sea, then went up the ladder to bed.