Watercolour-style tattoo of black outlined and solid stars with pink and blue washes and ink splatter on the ankle.

Watercolour stars on an ankle

Traditional · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows several black stars, some outlined and some solid, scattered diagonally up the ankle and lower leg. Loose pink, blue and grey washes sit behind them, with black ink splatters and drips running across the design. The photo is taken straight on under indoor light, with the foot and ankle filling most of the frame.

Traditional Ankle Star Splatter Watercolour Wash Ink drip

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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 reunion was held in the old hall on Fenwick Road, the one with the cracked skylight and the smell of floor polish that never left. Forty-one came. Most had not spoken since the summer the paint shed burned, and the teachers had all said the same thing, that it was the boys who lit it and the girls who ran for the water, and nobody could agree which were which.

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Dora Quayle, who had taught them all their long division, brought the register in a shoebox. She said the old folk used to say a child's name written in the book kept it from going out, and she read them aloud one by one. When she reached Tom Harrower, a black speck rose from the floorboards and hung near the ceiling. Then another came for Ruth Ellery, and another for the boy who had been sent home for splattering the wall with ink. They gathered into a loose scatter, some hollow, some solid, and the room went quiet the way a room does when someone has been missed.

Tom stood under them with his hands in his father's coat. He said he had thrown the paint, not the match. Dora said that did not matter to the stars, only that they had been called. The specks drifted down, one by one, and touched each of the forty-one on the shoulder, light as chalk, and left a little blue smudge behind.

Afterwards the caretaker swept up the glitter and found a single drip of black ink on the windowsill, still wet, in the shape of a small star. He left it there. It was the last thing anyone remembered of that night, and they were all glad to have been called.