Three small red star tattoos with dark blue outlines on the ankle of a bare foot resting on a mossy log, beside another foot with red painted toenails.

Three star tattoos on an ankle

Ankle · Colour · Photo

Two pairs of bare feet rest on a mossy log against a soft, blurred woodland background. On the outer ankle of the left foot are three small five-pointed stars in red with dark blue outlines, arranged in a loose diagonal line. The shallow focus and cool, muted tones keep the stars as the clearest detail in the frame.

Ankle Star Feet Toenails Log Denim

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry to Inishmore had stopped running for the season, so Maeve and I walked the shingle road to the old lighthouse with our shoes in our hands. She said the stars would show better from the rocks past the slipway, and she was right, though it took us an hour to get there because she kept stopping to pull three smooth stones from her pockets and line them up on the wall like a game only she understood.

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We sat on a fallen oak that the sea had dragged up the year before, its bark furred green where the spray reached it. My feet were cold and hers were pink from the wind, and we pressed our toes together for warmth the way we had since we were small enough to share a bath. She tapped the red polish on her nails, half chipped already, and told me the lighthouse keeper's daughter used to paint stars on her ankles so her father could find her in the dark dunes. Maeve had made that up on the walk, I was almost sure, but I let her have it.

When the moon came up over the water, she pulled up her trouser leg and showed me the three stars she had inked there in March, a loose line of red with blue edges, the kind of thing you do at eighteen on a dare and keep at forty on purpose. "Now you're the one who can find me," she said, and laughed, and I didn't tell her that I had never once lost her, not even when we were children and she swore she had gone to the other island on a gull's back.

We walked back with the stones in her pocket and the oak log behind us, and at the top of the shingle she stopped and held up her ankle to the light. The stars were still there, faint and certain, pointing the way home.