Realism tattoo of a star with torn-skin edges filled with words such as friendship, family and love in red, across a shoulder and upper arm.

Torn-skin star with words on shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A large star sits across the shoulder and upper arm, with its edges rendered as peeling, torn skin that reveals the words beneath. The words, including friendship, family, tolerance and integrity, are shaded in black and grey, with only the word love picked out in red. A small star tattoo appears at the top left, partly out of frame, and the lighting is soft against the white vest.

Realism Lettering Shoulder Upper arm Star Word Love Family Freedom Torn skin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been scraping the same panel for three days, and the star keeps coming back to you through forty years of grime. The foreman calls it a dead ident mark from the old Kestrel Reach docks, but a sign is not supposed to hide words under its skin. Your wire brush lifts a flake the size of a thumbnail, and beneath it letters swim up in grey: FRIENDSHIP, then a broken half-word, then FAMILY.

Keep reading

Nobody on the station reads anymore except the archivists in the lower ring, and they charge by the syllable. You take the panel to Odile, who keeps a counter of cracked glass and a lamp that hums like a bee. She turns the metal under the light and tilts her head. "Someone wanted these torn open," she says, running a thumb along the edges. "Look. They were lifted, not worn." She finds the one red word, LOVE, which the paint has held onto better than anything else.

You spend the night with the panel on your bunk, reading the list aloud to the dark: TOLERANCE, INTEGRITY, LIBERTY, and at the bottom a fragment that could be INSANITY or INSIGHT. Each word seems to ask whether you would have stood on a dock and believed it, and whether the people who cut it out still believed anything at all.

In the morning you hang the panel beside the airlock where the shift crews pass. Every one of them stops. By dinner there is a queue, and someone has chalked a new word along the bottom edge, small and crooked. You leave it there.