Fine line black tattoo of three small stars on a shoulder and collarbone, with a second panel showing the same stars above printed book text.

Three small stars near the collarbone

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The left panel shows a close view of a woman's upper shoulder and collarbone, with three small five-pointed star tattoos in black ink arranged in a loose cluster. The linework is fine and even, with solid black fills and no shading. The right panel shows the same star arrangement above a page of serif book text, set against a pale background.

Fine line Shoulder Star Constellation Text

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shift up, the lot of you, and mind the coal scuttle. You want the one about the lock keeper's girl and the book that would not stay shut? Then hold the lamp steady, because the page I tell it from is nearly rubbed through. Three stars hung over the Ashby cut every clear night for a hundred years, and nobody on the water could put a name to them. So Nell Tarrant, who kept the gates at Sallow Lock, pricked them out in the back of a waterlogged almanac with a sail needle and a thumb of soot.

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The almanac was no use for names, so she went looking for words. A narrowboat had sunk at the lower basin that spring, and its owner's novel had swelled up in the reeds like a loaf. Nell dried the leaves on the lock beam, one by one, and found a line that had survived the water: Something suddenly broke open in the reeds. She read it aloud each evening while the lock filled, and each evening the three stars sat a little lower over the water, as though listening.

On the last night of the frost she read the line twice, and the gate beam groaned, and the stars came down to the surface and lay there like coins on a tablecloth. Nell stepped out along the coping to fetch them, and the cut was black and perfectly still. She did not come back up. Her lantern was found on the lock beam in the morning, burning low, with the page pinned beneath it.

That's the whole of it. The gate men say the stars still show in the water at Sallow Lock when somebody reads that line out loud. Mind you don't read it too loud, or you'll have the reeds answering, and they never get the words right.