Black and white starfish design with curling scrolls and dotted lines along each arm, drawn as a tattoo flash in a blackwork and dotwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Starfish with scrollwork design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A five-armed starfish drawn in solid black outline on a white background. Each arm carries parallel lines, rows of dots and spiralling scrolls, with a flower-like petal centre. The design is high contrast and fills the frame evenly.

Blackwork Dotwork Starfish Scrollwork Swirl Dot Petal Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the wind off the cliff takes half of what I say and gives the rest to the gulls. Mind the wall. See the broken arch where the chapel roof fell in? Agnes Harrow kept her lamp in that window, and every low tide a starfish came crawling up the black rocks below to sit on her sill.

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Five arms it had, each one curled at the tip like a fern uncurling, with rows of dots running down its back like the rivets on a drawbridge. The garrison swore it was a sea-witch's spy. Agnes only fed it mussel meat and asked it nothing. She said it watched the water better than any man on the walls, and she was right, because it always knew when the fog was coming in off the reef before the bell did.

Then came the winter the oil ran out. Three herring boats were out past the Teeth when the fog closed like a fist, and the lamp in the window had gone cold. Agnes ran down the stair with her skirts in her fists, and there on the sill was the starfish, its arms spread flat against the glass. It had drawn its own pale light up through its body, dot by dot, until the window glowed the colour of a candle through linen. The boats turned for it. Every one came home.

The lamp is long gone, and nobody has tended that window in three hundred years. But on a still night, when the tide is turning, the fishermen say a faint light still climbs the broken arch, shaped like five curling arms. Don't go looking for it. Just keep your eyes on the sill, and count the dots.