Two small black outline eight-pointed star tattoos on the wrist, drawn in a fine line style.

Two eight-pointed stars on a wrist

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the inner wrist and lower forearm of a light-skinned person, with two small eight-pointed star tattoos. The larger star sits higher and to the right, and the smaller one sits lower and to the left, both drawn as thin black outlines with a pale centre. The ink is black on skin with a warm, slightly soft, close-up composition against a dark background.

Fine line Other Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lime was already crusting on my knuckles when I found the stars. Someone had cut them into the lintel above the arrow slit in the north tower, two eight-pointed shapes no bigger than teacups, their rays drawn as thin grooves with the centres left smooth and pale. Mr Tallis, who had kept Harrowgate Keep for forty years without once climbing that stair, said they had always been there and nobody had thought to ask what they pointed at.

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I asked the clerk in Alnwick, who asked his mother, who remembered a rhyme about a bell lost in the moat during the winter of the siege. The rhyme said the bell would ring again once the stars were read true. It was the sort of nonsense you tell children to stop them crying, and I told myself so while I hung a plumb line from the arrow slit on the third night, a torch wedged in my teeth.

The larger star, higher on the stone, sighted straight down through the gatehouse arch. The smaller one, lower and off to the left, lay over the old well. Where the two lines crossed on the flagstones I found a ring of iron sunk in the rubble, rusted to the colour of stewed tea. It took a crowbar and most of my patience to lift the flag beneath it.

Under the flag was a wooden box, damp but whole, and inside it a brass bell no bigger than my palm, its clapper tied with a red ribbon faded to pink. Pinned beneath it was a scrap of paper in a child's hand: keep it true to the stars and it will come home. I rang it once in the empty tower, and the sound went up the stairs and out through the slit, and I left the lime bucket where it stood.