Black and white photo of a fine line tattoo of small stars and curling swirls on the side of the hip, with a navel piercing visible above.

Stars and swirls on the hip

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a torso showing a thin, single-line tattoo of five-pointed stars and curling swirls, with one star trailing a fine line like a shooting star. The linework is simple and unshaded, in black ink. The image is in black and white, and the tattoo sits off-centre in the lower frame beside a bikini waistband.

Fine line Other Star Swirl Line art

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You had been told the walled garden at Hollins Park shut at dusk, which is why you were still kneeling in the cold frame when the sky over the glasshouse went white. Mrs Pargeter would have clicked her tongue at you. The light came down slow and thin, trailing a line behind it like a stitch pulled through cloth, and you forgot the trowel in your hand.

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Next morning you found her in the potting shed, sorting seed packets into biscuit tins. She didn't look up. "Lyra's dust, my mother called them," she said. You asked whether she had ever seen one stop and turn. She gave a dry laugh and pushed a stack of old notebooks across the bench. Every page had a date, a sky description, and a small pencilled spiral in the margin, the same curl the fiddleheads made on the south wall each spring.

You spent that winter learning the notebooks. The spirals were never the same twice, but they always opened inward, and you began to think they were not drawings of the falls at all but of the ferns, counting time the way the ferns did, unrolling a little more each night. In February you copied one into the front of your own book: a single unbroken line, and three small stars at its tail.

When Mrs Pargeter died in March, the fern wall was in bud. You planted her last row of seed beside it, dug the holes with the blunt trowel, and wrote the date in pencil at the foot of a fresh page. Then you looked up. The sky was clear and empty, so you waited, the way she had taught you, until something came down over the glasshouse and drew its bright thread across the dark.