Colour tattoo of a red starfish, pink and grey shells and seaweed on the side of a ribcage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Starfish and shells on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A red starfish sits above a pink conch-style shell, with a grey-shaded scallop shell and a spiral shell below, all linked by fine seaweed stems. The linework is dark and defined, with soft grey shading giving the shells some depth and the warm red and orange tones standing out against the skin. The design is set vertically along the side of the torso, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Botanical Ribs Starfish Shell Seaweed Scallop shell

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The net had come up empty for nine days, so Corra rowed the boat past the black rocks herself, though her father had told her the sea took what it liked from women who went alone. She carried a clay jar, a bone-handled knife and a flat loaf wrapped in linen. The water under the hull turned from green to the colour of slate, and then she saw the starfish, orange-red and the size of a hand, clinging to the stern rope as if it had been waiting for her.

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It did not speak. Starfish do not. But when she lifted it from the rope, its arms curled over her wrist and a cold pull ran up her arm toward the depths. She understood that it wanted something. She broke off a piece of bread and dropped it over the side. A conch rose slowly beside the boat, pink as the inside of a fingernail, and from its mouth came a long low note like wind across the neck of a jar.

Beneath the surface, in a meadow of kelp that swayed like loose hair, stood an old woman with a scallop shell on her back and a spiral snail curled at her ankle. She asked Corra what she had brought to trade for the nets. Corra had nothing but the knife. The woman shook her head and pointed at the sail, which was full of holes, and then at the starfish, which had climbed back onto the boat's rail to watch.

Corra came up with her hands empty and found the nets heavy with silver fish that had not been there before. Her father counted them twice and wept into his beard. Every spring after, she tied a red thread to the stern and left the first catch on the rocks, and the sea never once asked her for more than that.