Fine line black tattoo of two hands reaching towards each other with scattered star shapes between them, on the lower leg.

Two reaching hands with stars on a calf

Fine line · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of two outlined hands, one reaching in from the left and one from the lower right, with a ring of small asterisk-like stars and dots between them. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, so the design relies on outline and negative space. The image is in black ink on pale skin, and the framing is straight on, showing the lower leg just above the ankle.

Fine line Calf Hand Star Sparkle Line art Celestial

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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

The sugar ran out somewhere off Dogger Bank, so for the Christmas duff I made stars out of whatever the galley had left. Pepper, mostly. Cloves when the tin was low. Cook had taught me to press them into the dough with the back of a fork, and I'd done it so often my wrist knew the shape without me: a little cross, a little spoke, a dot for the ones too small to bother with.

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Halvard came down the companionway at four bells with frost on his collar and held his hands out over the stove without being asked. Big hands, split at the knuckles, the nails black from the winch. He never thanked me for the heat. He just looked at the deckhead as though the warmth had come down from up there. I told him the stars were for his sister in Lerwick, who had written that from her flat she could see nothing but the gasworks and a gull on the chimney.

He said that was no sky at all, and that a sky had to be made by hand if you wanted one. Then he took the fork from me, pressed a ring of stars round the edge of a tray the way I'd never bothered to, and left a gap in the middle for the flour to rise through.

When the duff came out of the oven it was lopsided and smelled of cloves. Halvard reached across the table and lifted the first tray from my hands, and for a moment we both held it, neither of us quite letting go, while the stars cooled between us on the board.