Blue pencil sketch of a toothy anglerfish with a spiral eye, feathery fins and a hanging lantern, drawn as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anglerfish sketch with lantern lure

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A blue ink or pencil sketch shows an anglerfish-like creature with a large open jaw of sharp teeth, a spiral eye and a small hanging lantern on a stalk above the mouth. Feathery fins and leafy curls trail behind the head and fill the space around it. The linework is loose and sketchy with some light shading, set against a plain cream page with a pencil lying along the left edge.

Neo-trad Lantern Teeth Eye Fin Leaves Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Dunmore House had been dead since March, so the whole block took the stairs in the dark. The stairwell lights went out on the eleventh floor and stayed out. By the second week nobody complained. You learned the rail by touch and counted the landings. That was how I first saw the light below me, a small yellow glow swinging slowly on the ninth landing, as if someone were carrying a lantern up from very deep water.

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Dev, Mr Sayer's grandson, told me what it was. He was nine and had been sent up with shopping and a torch with no batteries. 'It lives down the lift shaft,' he said. 'It has a light on a stick so the food comes to it.' He said it as if it were obvious, and I did not argue, because I had glimpsed the teeth: a pale row of them at knee height where the stairwell opens onto the bin chute.

I went down on the Thursday with my own torch and a packet of digestives in my coat. The lantern hung level with my face, a little cage of bent tin, and under it a great open mouth fringed with fins like frayed lace. Above the jaw sat a single round eye that regarded me with the patience of something that had waited under the building for fifty years. I held out a biscuit. It considered this, then took the packet from my fingers as politely as a bank clerk, and drew it back into the dark.

The next morning the stairwell light was on. Nobody had fixed it. The lantern had been moved to the bannister on the eleventh floor, where the switch should be, and it glowed there steady enough for the whole block to find its way home. I still take the stairs. On Thursdays I bring something down for it. The lift has never come back, and I have stopped minding.