Colour tattoo of an orange starfish with blue swirling vines and small flowers across a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Starfish and blue swirling vines on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows an orange starfish at the top, with a shaded, dimensional body and fine lines, set against blue swirling vines and small blue flowers that trail downwards. The linework is thin and delicate, with dotted accents scattered among the curls. Blue and orange ink dominate the design, which sits centrally on the back against plain skin.

Botanical Fine line Back Starfish Swirl Vine Flower Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The starfish had been clinging to the same rock for three tides when Mrs Pengelly decided it was lonely. She carried it up from Porthgwidden in a bucket of seawater, past the chandler's and the boarded-up net loft, and set it on the sill of her kitchen window, where the afternoon sun came in sideways across the tiles.

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The starfish did not care for the sill. It wanted the blue tangle of wrack that grew at the foot of the harbour wall, the curling stalks that moved like slow hands, and the sea-thrift that flowered pale in the cracks. Each night it inched a little further along the ledge, and each morning Mrs Pengelly found a crust of dried salt and a trail of tiny blue dots leading towards the back door.

On the ninth morning the trail ended at the step. The starfish had gone over the threshold, down the lane, through the gap in the wall where the vines hung thick, and out onto the wet stones. Mrs Pengelly followed in her slippers, her tea going cold in one hand, and found it wedged between two swirls of weed, orange as a lamp, its arms spread wide to the tide.

She did not carry it back. She sat on the wall with her slippers soaking through and watched the water climb the vines one curl at a time, until the starfish lifted from the stone and let itself be carried out past the breakwater, a small bright thing turning slowly in the blue.