Colour tattoo of an orange starfish with blue scrolling waves and small flowers on a person's upper back.

Starfish and scrollwork on upper back

Fine line · Back · Colour · Photo

A bright orange starfish sits at the centre of a tattoo made of blue linework scrolls, wave shapes and small outlined flowers. Fine blue lines trace the swirls, while the starfish and some wave shapes are shaded with lighter tones. The design runs vertically down the upper back against plain skin, with a dotted line curling up from the top.

Fine line Botanical Back Starfish Scroll Wave Flower Swirl Dotted line

Find an artist for this

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

"Give it here, boy, and mind the spines. Hold it like a hot loaf, not a stone." Ada Pryce took the starfish from the net and turned it over on her palm, the way she had turned over a thousand catches in forty years on the slip at Carrow Cove. Its arms were the colour of marmalade, freckled with light, and wet sand clung to them in little curls.

Keep reading

"One arm short, this one," she said, tilting it to the grey dawn. "See the stump, how it's healing over. They grow them back, you know, given cold water and enough patience. A whole new arm out of nothing but waiting." Tomasz asked her why she kept them if she could only borrow them. "I don't keep them. I lend them a bucket." She set the star in seawater beside the cottage step, where the tide-lace curled and fell back on itself like the scrolls on the old harbour gates.

Her husband Eli had gone out in the autumn of the big swell and never come back up the slip. Every morning since, Ada had sat on that step with her tea going cold, counting the foam that rolled in white and blue and vanished. Tomasz sat with her that morning, watching the star drift slowly in its bucket, its arms folding and unfolding like a hand feeling for something in the dark.

In the morning the bucket was empty. A line of small wet dimples led down the stones to the water, and on the step lay a single curl of blue weed, shaped exactly like a wave closing over itself. Ada laughed, a sound Tomasz had not heard from her in years, and said the sea had come to collect its loan. He still swears the star had grown its missing arm back before it went.