Black and grey shaded star tattoo with dotted swirls trailing across the top of a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Trailing stars on a foot

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A column of shaded five-pointed stars, graduating from small to large, runs diagonally across the top and side of a foot. Fine stippled dots and curling lines link the stars and spread outward from the trail. The stars use solid black and grey shading with soft highlights, and the dotwork is set against plain pale skin.

Dotwork Other Star Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ceiling of the Regal had been black for six weeks before Mr Corrigan let Ada Pelling climb the scaffold with a tin of silver paint and a box of stiff brushes. 'Stars,' he said, as if the word were a bill he had been made to pay. 'Small ones. Not too many, and keep them off the chandelier.'

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She started at the back, above the projection box, where the plaster was still damp from the last coat. Her first stars were no bigger than a thumbprint, dotted out in fine spatter the way her mother flicked salt over a pie crust. Then she let a curl of paint run from one of them like smoke off a match, and another, until the whole thing wandered toward the house lights like a trail somebody had dropped on purpose.

The stars grew as they came forward. By the time she reached the fire exit above the doors, each one was the size of a dinner plate, shaded grey at the edges so they seemed to lift off the ceiling. Corrigan came up the ladder with his hat in his hand and told her to paint them out. 'People want to see the screen, not be led about the room,' he said. Ada told him people in the dark always looked for the way out, and that she would rather they found it by starlight than by panic.

He let her keep them. In March the mains failed halfway through a newsreel and four hundred people sat in a blackness so complete that a boy in the stalls began to cry. Then, faintly at first, the silver came up out of the ceiling, leading down and out past the doors into the street. The Regal was pulled down in 1961. Somebody who had been a child in those seats told me the last thing he remembered was the stars over the fire door, still pointing the way out.