Black linework tattoo of stars and swirling lines on the side of a torso, just above the waistband.

Stars and swirls on the side of the torso

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black outline tattoo of five-pointed stars joined by curling swirls and several sweeping parallel lines. The linework is bold and solid with no visible shading, and the stars are left unfilled against the skin. The design runs diagonally across the side of the torso, with the largest swirl curling toward the lower right.

Ribs Star Swirl Scrollwork Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp had guttered twice before Tom Ashby thought to ask why the Mary Ellen's logbook showed a star that appeared on no chart in the Admiralty drawer. Old Hesketh Ferris pushed his spectacles up and said nothing, only ran a finger along the page where someone had pencilled five small stars in a loose cluster, each joined to the next by a line that curled back on itself like a ribbon left out in the rain.

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The men who had sailed this coast at the turn of the century swore by those lines. Ferris had learned them from his father, who called them drift-marks. The sweeping parallel bands were the set of the tide over the Carr rocks, the curls were eddies where the water turned back on itself, and the stars were fixed points a man could steer by when the cloud came down. Tom had always taken it for superstition until he laid the sheet against the window and saw that the thickest curl ran straight into the gap in the cliffs at Scaur Cove.

They rowed out on the morning ebb with the tide tables folded in Tom's coat. The water went quiet exactly where the lines said it would, and a lobster pot with a red rag tied to it bobbed in the still patch as if someone had left it there on purpose. Ferris hauled it in without a word. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, was a tin box with the same five stars stamped on its lid, rusted now to a dull brown.

Back at the shop Tom traced the stars onto the new chart in ink, leaving them hollow the way the old hands always had. Ferris watched him and said a thing you could steer by should never be filled in. You left the sky showing through, so the next man knew where the water was.