Black and grey dotwork and blackwork tattoo of a woman with closed eyes and windswept hair filled with stars and moons, on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman with starry flowing hair on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's head and bust are shown with eyes closed, her long hair streaming to the left and filled with stars, moons and small circles. The face and shoulders are shaded with fine stippled dots, while the hair uses bold black linework with flowing strands. The design is entirely black and grey and sits centred across the upper back, with a small arched opening drawn on the chest.

Dotwork Blackwork Back Woman Portrait Hair Star Moon Celestial Arch

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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

Now sit down, the lot of you, and stop pulling at the cord, because this is the last lamp we have and I mean to spend it properly. You have all heard that the old sky came down in the hard years. It did not come down. It went into hair. My grandmother's grandmother kept the stars in her plait, and when the dust storms took the glass of the observatory at Penhallow, she was the only record left.

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Her name was Ysolde Narrow, and she kept the little stone arch at the top of the dome road, the door that opened onto the stairs down to the seed vaults. Every night she closed her eyes and let the wind off the salt flats lift her hair, and the stars came out in it one by one. She counted them aloud so the children would know where north was. Some nights there were eleven moons. Some nights she missed one, and a child was lost on the flats by morning.

The year the wells failed, the council sent a man in a grey coat to take her hair down for the reckoning. He climbed the dome road with a cutter and a box of brass pins. She did not open her eyes. She only said, "Count them yourself, then," and tipped her head back so the moons spilled toward his boots. He counted until his lips cracked and gave up in the fourth hour. Then he sat down beside her on the step and asked her to teach him the north.

They say he stayed on that hill until he was old, and that his own hair grew long and dark in the last winter. When the dust finally cleared, the children climbed to the arch and found the two of them asleep with their faces turned up, the constellations thick in both their hair. So when you go up the dome road tonight, look up and not down. And mind the step. It is still warm from them.