Black and grey tattoo on the side of the ribs showing flying silhouettes against soft clouds, with a curved script quote above them.

Peter Pan silhouettes and quote on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Black silhouettes of a flying figure, a second figure and a smaller companion move across soft blue-grey clouds on the side of the ribs. A curved banner of black script reads "Second star to the right and straight on til morning." The clouds are smooth and shaded, fading into the surrounding skin.

Lettering Ribs Silhouette Flying Cloud Night sky Quote

Find an artist for this

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

Nell had been told the directions so many times that they had worn smooth, like the pebbles on the harbour wall. Second star to the right. Her gran had said it through the winter of the power cuts, when the flat above the chip shop went dark by six and the only light came from the paraffin lamp in the window. "Straight on till morning," Gran would say, and Nell, who was nine and far too old for that, would pretend to be bored.

Keep reading

Years later Nell worked nights at the Holyhead ferry terminal, checking manifests under strip lights that buzzed like trapped wasps. Her brother Sam rang her at two in the morning from a lay-by on the A55, engine ticking as it cooled, to say he couldn't sleep and didn't know why he'd bothered trying. Lorries thundered past him in the dark. He sounded smaller than he had at Gran's funeral.

She didn't read him the directions. Instead she walked out onto the quay, where the clouds were tearing apart over the Irish Sea, and she found the star she remembered and told it, out loud, which way to go. Down the phone she heard Sam snort, then laugh properly, the first real laugh in weeks.

"Right," he said. "Then straight on till morning." Nell stayed out on the cold stone until the first sailing sounded its horn and the stars went thin and quiet, and then she went back inside to finish the manifest.