Pencil sketch of a tattoo design with swirling scrolls and five-pointed stars trailing diagonally across a white background.

Swirling stars in pencil sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a diagonal design made from outlined five-pointed stars of varying sizes, linked by long curling scrolls and swooping lines. The linework is soft and sketched, with grey shading around the stars to give them some depth. The design is in black and grey on a plain white background, with the stars spread unevenly so the composition moves from the lower left to the upper right.

Star Swirl Scroll Sketch Trail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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Mr Pargeter has finally let me take the ladder up to the ballroom ceiling, so you can stop writing that I'll fall through the chandelier. The plasterwork is the colour of weak tea and nobody has looked up at it since the war. I am doing stars. Five points each, pencilled first, the way you taught me to draw the rigging on the ferry posters, light enough to lose if I'm wrong.

I started at the bottom corner by the fire door and worked out towards the tall windows, so the trail climbs the way the tide did on Tuesday, pulling the lamplighters' stars out past the pier head. Every third star I let a curl run off the edge like a ribbon caught in wind. Mrs Okafor from the tobacconist's came in at eleven with a flask and stood under me for half an hour, saying nothing, then said the big one by the window was too far east. I told her the windows are east. She laughed so hard she had to sit on the bandstand steps.

Last night the streetlamps went out along the front, the council's doing, and from up here the whole promenade was dark except for the ballroom glow. I could see the stars I'd drawn in pencil set against the real ones over the sea, and for a minute I couldn't tell which were mine.

Come in August. Bring the good charcoal. I want you to tell me where the last one should go, the one that's going nowhere in particular, and I'll put it wherever you point.

Love, Tom