Flash sheet of twelve black line drawings of zodiac signs, each labelled with its name, in a bold tribal style with arrows and feathers.

Zodiac symbols flash sheet

Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of twelve zodiac sign designs arranged in two rows, each labelled in capitals beneath: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces. The drawings use bold black linework with hatched and striped fills, and several incorporate arrows, feathers, dots and crescent shapes. The ink is black on a plain cream background, and some symbols have light grey outlines or fills.

Zodiac Arrow Feather Crescent Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are nineteen the year the ship's almanac stops matching the sky, and Mother Okonkwo hands you the brush anyway. "The stars have moved," she says, "so the signs must catch up." She means the old hull plates stamped with the twelve glyphs, which the crew still read as weather. Aries is the arrowhead. Sagittarius is the arrow with its beads of light. Pisces is two curved fish bound by a bar.

Keep reading

You work through the cold watch with a stencil and a tin of black enamel. Each glyph needs its hatching, the stripes that show where the hull is a seam, and the feathers that count the years since departure. Virgo's line has to bend around the coolant pipe. Scorpio's tail hooks the lamp housing. Nobody asked you to make the crescents match the moon of the world you left, but you do anyway, two horns on Gemini, one lifted on Taurus like a bowl holding rain.

On the last night you climb to the observation spar and find that the arrow of Sagittarius points almost exactly at a dim star the almanac lists only as a number. Your fingers are still tacky with paint. Mother Okonkwo said the signs were for steering, and they are, but you understand now that they were also for the crew, so that whoever came after could find a shape they recognised in the dark.

Beneath the arrowhead you paint your own name in the small capitals the labels use, then the date of the next watch. The hull will outlast the almanac, and someone will scrape the paint off one day to see what the ship once believed about the sky.