Realistic star tattoo on an upper arm that looks like peeling skin, filled with words such as freedom, family and friendship, with the word love in red.

Torn-skin star with words on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A five-pointed star sits on the upper arm and shoulder, with its edges shaded to look like torn and lifted skin. Words including friendship, freedom, family, tolerance and integrity fill the star in grey lettering, and the word love is picked out in red at the centre. The shading gives the design depth, and the image is a close, angled shot of the arm against a white vest.

Realism Lettering Upper arm Star Word Freedom Love Family Torn skin

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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

Come in out of the wet, the lot of you, and mind the puddle by the fish stall, it's been there since Tuesday. Right. You want the one about the star on the hoarding. Everybody wants that one.

Keep reading

The star went up on the old cinema wall on Calder Street the winter the mill shut. Some printer's lad in a hurry had run it off in grey ink, five points, the edges shaded so it looked like paper lifting off a wet wall. Across it went the words in heavy type: LIFE, LIBERTY, HAPPINESS, FRIENDSHIP, FAMILY, TOLERANCE, INTEGRITY, and in the middle, the one word he'd put in red because he'd run out of grey for it, LOVE. Nobody paid it much mind. Posters came and went on that wall like weather.

But the rain got under the paper. Every night it loosened a little more, and every morning there was a new curl at a point or a tear across the belly of the star. Old Dorothy who sold buttons on the corner swore she saw a young woman up a stepladder at three in the morning, working at the edges with a flat knife and a jar of paste, easing the sheet away a fraction at a time. Dorothy never asked who. Some things you don't ask.

By spring the star had lifted clean off the brick, and there under it, cut deep into the render with a nail or a key, were the same words, older and rougher, scratched by somebody who'd meant every one. Nobody could say who. The paper was gone within the week, bundled up and carried off in the rain. So when you're counting out your change, love, look at the wall behind the bunting. The words are still there, and they're rather better than the printer's.