Fine line tattoo of a small star joined to a faint dotted line across the side of the ribs, in black ink.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tiny star and dotted line on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small asterisk-shaped star sits at the top of a faint dotted line that curves diagonally down the side of the ribcage. The linework is very fine and the dots are evenly spaced, with a soft grey tone. The subject is cropped to the torso, with a pale blue sweater pulled up by a hand and pink underwear visible at the bottom edge.

Fine line Ribs Star Dotted line Constellation

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad never trusted a chart he hadn't pricked himself. Every Sunday on Scarrow he laid the Admiralty sheet across the kitchen table and walked a pin along the route, making a hole every mile or so, so the crossing could be read by lamplight when the sky went out. I thought it was fussy until the winter the fog came down over the Sound and the radio went quiet for a whole night.

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The star at the top was the one he always found first, a little asterisk he said was the fixed point, the one that never moved while everything else wheeled round it. He'd tap it with his thumbnail. "Keep that behind your left shoulder and you'll not lose the island." Brodie took the ferry out that evening with the new relief mate, and I stood on the slipway with the torch, counting the dots I could remember and pricking them into a spare sheet with his old brass compass pin.

At four in the morning the engine note came back from the east, faint, then clear. I held the chart up to the lamp in the window and the light came through every hole in a line, a thin bright path from the harbour wall out to the point, and I could follow it with my finger all the way to where they were.

They tied up at first light. Dad never mentioned the chart. He only folded it into his coat and kept it there, the pinholes still running through forty years of sea.