Dotwork tattoo of stars and dotted spirals running up a forearm, set against a red patterned fabric.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stars and dotted spirals on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A chain of five-pointed stars of varying sizes rises diagonally up the forearm, linked by fine dotted trails and small dotted spiral rings. The stars are solid dark ink with a slight sheen, while the trails are built from tiny stippled dots. The forearm sits against a red and maroon patterned fabric, which dominates the background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, and mind the tea, it's stewed. My grandmother kept the light at Scarth Head for thirty-one years, and she never once let the lamp go dark, not even the winter the oil ran short and she burned rendered lard from the kitchen.

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Each night before the lamp was lit she climbed the spiral stair with a tin of brass pins and a folded chart. Stars first, she used to say, then the sea decides the rest. She pricked the big fixed stars into the plaster of the watch room, and between them she pricked the dotted courses of the herring boats, little rings where the tide turned back on itself in the Sound.

One October a boy from the Ferguson boats came up the stair asking for his father, three days overdue. She had no news for him. She sat him down beside the chart and told him to find the brightest star on the wall, follow the dots from there, and stop when he reached the spiral, because that was where the rocks lay under the water. He didn't believe her. He went anyway, and he found the shallow pool below the spiral, and his father sitting on the shingle beside an upturned boat with a cracked oar across his knees.

So when you ask why she kept the dots, that's your answer. The stars tell you where you are. The dots tell you where the sea wants you to go, and the spirals are where it changes its mind. Now drink your tea before it goes cold, and mind the third stair. It's loose, same as it always was.

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