Black tribal-style flash design of two swooping S-shaped bands with outlined and solid stars, shown on a plain white background with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal swirl with stars design

Black and grey · Flash

The design shows two long, tapering S-shaped bands that sweep from top to bottom, with thin curved lines extending beyond them. Two outlined five-pointed stars sit at the upper right and lower left, with several small solid stars scattered along the left and right edges. It is rendered in solid black ink on a white background with no shading or colour.

Star Swirl Ribbon Tribal Curve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wasps have already found the windfalls under the Bramley row, so you pick your way between them with the basket on your hip and the ladder knocking against the wall. Late August smells of cider and crushed grass. Nan is at the gate with her hands in her apron, shouting that the light will go before you finish the north side, and she is right, as she always is about the light.

Keep reading

She taught you to read the orchard the way other people read a map. The two burns that run down the slope from the old quarry bend like ribbons on a maypole, she said, and wherever they cross the wall you will find the earliest pears and the last plums. Every evening you walk the length of them with a torch in your teeth, checking the branches for the small hard fruit that will never ripen and the bright one the blackbirds have already tasted.

On the last night before she went into hospital, she stood at the top of the ladder and pointed out the stars over the sloe hedge. Five points each, like the tin ones she nailed to the shed door when you were small. The little ones are your windfalls, she said. The big ones you keep.

Now you climb to the top rung, where the air is still warm, and fill the basket with the sharpest fruit you can reach. Below you the burns curl into their two long S-shapes in the failing light, and the first star comes out above the hedge. You hold up your hand to it, and it is only an apple after all, green and cold against your palm.