Colour realism tattoo of two overlapping starfish, one red and one pale pink, with shaded edges, on the ankle.

Two starfish on a lower leg

Realism · Ankle · Colour · Photo

Two overlapping starfish are tattooed on the lower leg, one deep red and one pale pink, each covered in small white speckles. The shading gives the arms a rounded, three-dimensional look, with darker edges and soft highlights. The pink starfish sits over the red one near the centre, and the design fills most of the frame against plain skin.

Realism Ankle Starfish Ocean

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last train from the coast is always late, and tonight you are the only one on Saltcombe Road to wait for it. You sweep sand off the platform toward the drain, the way your father taught you, never against the grain of the boards. On the bench under the lamp someone has left a shortbread tin. Inside, wrapped in a grey wool sock, are two dried starfish: one brick red, one the colour of weak tea. Both are freckled white, as if someone flicked a paintbrush across them and then thought better of it.

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In the lost property cupboard the ledger lists two umbrellas, a single glove, and a violin case with no violin. You write 'two starfish, found bench three, 9.40pm' and stop with the pen above the page. The sock has a name written on its heel in marker: BERTIE, DO NOT SIT ON. Somebody once loved that sock enough to label it. You set the tin on the shelf between a box of spectacles and a tennis racquet.

The 9.52 arrives with a single carriage, and the only passenger is an old man in a flat cap who asks, before he has even reached the barrier, whether anyone has handed in starfish. He says his wife collected them off the groyne every August, and that she always claimed they came in pairs because they found each other in the rock pools. You bring the tin down. He tips the contents onto the bench, and the pink one slides across the paint until it rests against the red, arms folded over each other as though they have been holding on the whole time.

He signs the ledger slowly, pressing so hard the nib catches. At the gate he turns back, touches his cap, and says, 'She'd have liked that they didn't get separated.' Then he walks off into the harbour dark, and you stand under the lamp wondering why, of all the things in that tin, he wanted the two of them together rather than the red one alone.