Black ink script reading Second star to the right, and straight on 'til morning, inside a stippled dotwork circle with two small stars, drawn as a lettering design.

Peter Pan quote in a dotted circle with stars

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A handwritten calligraphy quote, 'Second star to the right, and straight on 'til morning', with the attribution PETER PAN in small capitals, sits inside a circle of stippled dots. Two small four-pointed stars appear above the circle. The lettering and dots are in black ink on white paper, with a fountain pen and ink bottle beside it on a wooden surface.

Lettering Dotwork Quote Star Circle Script Ink

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last bus had gone by the time Marion Fell locked the lettering studio on Cheetham Hill Road. The streetlamps threw that sodium orange that made every doorway look like an old photograph. She carried her pen case under one arm and a tin of walnut ink under the other, and she took the long way home, past the shuttered bakery and the launderette with its one bored light, because the long way was where she could see the sky.

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She had been commissioned to letter a christening card for a boy called Eli Mercer. His mother wanted the line her own father used to read from a battered paperback, the one about the second star. Marion had written it out nine times before the strokes felt right. On the tenth attempt, at two in the morning at her kitchen table, she dipped the nib until her wrist ached, then ringed the words with a dotting pen, one tiny point at a time, so the edge would look like frost creeping across a window.

The mother rang the next afternoon, her voice thin. She said the card was perfect, but could Marion add a pair of stars above the circle, the way her father used to draw them in the margins of her school books. Marion said she would, and then, because the phone was still warm against her ear, she asked whether he had read the story to other children too. The mother laughed, then stopped, and said only, "He read it to me until I was too old to want it."

That evening Marion inked two stars, one slightly larger than the other, and sealed the card in a cream envelope. Walking home, she looked up past the flats and the ring road lights until she found the pair that matched her drawing. She picked the second one to the right and kept walking, straight on, until the morning.