Two bare feet with red toenails on a rock: one has black script reading Illuminate across the top, and the other has a colour peacock feather tattoo near the ankle.

Illuminate script and peacock feather on feet

Lettering · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

Two bare feet with painted red toenails rest on grey rock. The upper foot has the word Illuminate in black cursive script running across the top of the foot, with bold, even linework. The lower foot has a detailed peacock feather in teal, green and gold, with soft shading along the quill that runs up towards the ankle, where a multicoloured woven bracelet is also worn.

Lettering Realism Ankle Other Script Peacock feather Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the feather in the third-floor linen cupboard, tucked behind a stack of tea towels that still smell of carbolic. Mrs Ferris has been dead since March and the last lodgers left in June, but the house on Marrow Terrace keeps hold of things nobody has come back for. The feather is as long as your forearm, its eye gone the colour of wet slate, and someone has pressed it flat inside a Bradshaw's timetable from 1923.

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Mrs Ferris never let anyone into the back attic, so you climb up with the torch the chandler's boy lent you. A single bulb hangs over a sill crowded with glass jars, each holding a peacock feather laid out like a cut flower. On the whitewashed wall someone has written ILLUMINATE in pencil, the capitals faded, the loops of the letters tipped forward the way a girl writes when a stern nun has taught her copperplate.

Beneath the jars is a bundle of letters addressed to Edie, all in the same slanting hand, all signed Tobias. He was a lamplighter on the pier before the war and he sailed out one October with the tide and never came back. The last letter says the pier lamps are the only honest thing left in town, and that when the sea fog rolls in he will light one for her every night until she sees it from the window.

You put the feathers back in their jars and carry the timetable downstairs. At the front window the pier lamps are coming on one by one through the mist, and you count them, the way he must have counted them, until the last one catches and holds.