White line design of a wizard hat with scattered stars and spiral swirls on a plain black background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wizard hat with stars and spirals

Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a pointed wizard hat with a curled brim, surrounded by outlined and solid five-pointed stars and a small crescent moon. Bold spiral swirls form the base of the hat and the lower edge, drawn in clean white strokes. The image is black and white only, with the motif centred on a plain black background.

Star Spiral Crescent moon

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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 hat came up from the salvage hold of the tug Pell's Patience, folded flat inside a crate of spent ion filters. Nobody on Halloran Ring claimed it, so the quartermaster handed it to me, mostly because I was the only one who asked what the spirals meant. Its brim curled back on itself like a tide lock, and the stars were punched from old mirror foil that still threw light when I tilted it toward the lamp.

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Tamsin in the archive said it was a conjuror's cap from the Dunmere ferries, worn by a man who talked the dust squalls into going round rather than through. The ferry crews believed the spirals were shipping lanes, drawn small enough to fit on a head. She showed me a scratched photograph of a crew laughing in a galley, each of them with a foil star pinned somewhere on their coat. The crescent moon on the band had a hairline of engraving that nobody had ever translated.

I took it up to the forward blister on the ninth shift, when the squall was grinding at the outer panels like gravel in a mill. Holding the hat against the glass, I traced the engraving with my thumb, and the foil stars caught the storm's glow and scattered it into a pattern I could read: two spirals, a gap, a bearing. I radioed the bearing to the cutter at the lock. Their pilot called back that the lane was open and asked who had sent it. I said it had come with the filters.

When the squall passed I returned the hat to its crate, leaving one loose foil star wedged in the fold where the next person would find it. Tamsin says that is superstition. I think it is only good manners to leave something behind for whoever needs a way through next.