Black fine line tattoo of outlined stars, curling swirls and dotted sparkles on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stars and swirls on a shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows three outlined five-pointed stars, one large star at the lower left and two smaller ones above and to the right, joined by thin curling swirls. Small dotted sparkles surround the stars and a cluster of dots sits near the lower centre. The linework is single-weight black with no shading, set against smooth skin with a plain white top at the left edge and a road in the background.

Fine line Shoulder Star Swirl Dot Sparkle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ibiyemi Carrow had swept the fairground at Lowmoor for thirty-one summers, and she never once swept up a star that stayed fallen. The rockets went up over the rec every August, the sparks came down on the tarmac in little grey smudges, and she would crouch with her dustpan and her bad knee and say, "Not you, not tonight," and tip them into the bin.

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The year the Gallagher boy set off a box of Roman candles on the bandstand, something came down that did not go out. It sat on the kerb by the chip van, five points of it, cold as a sixpence, and it hummed in a thin voice like a kettle a long way off. Ibiyemi looked at it for a long time. Then she wrapped it in her cardigan and carried it home past the shut library, where the lamps were already coming on along the road.

Her granddaughter Tess was nine and thought it was a sweet. "It's only a star," she said. "Put it back up." Ibiyemi said stars did not climb, they only went where the wind pushed them, and that was why you had to keep your eye on the ones you loved.

On the third morning the star was gone from the cardigan. In its place, on the back step, lay a single curl of silver thread, looping and looping like smoke off a candle, with a trail of dots going up the lane towards the hill. Tess followed it in her wellies. Ibiyemi followed Tess, and saw the swirl unspool over the wall and lift, and somewhere above the rooftops three small lights caught hold of it and pulled.