A gloved tattoo artist works with a machine on a black and grey figure tattoo on a person's upper arm, with the design partly visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey tattoo being worked on an upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A tattooist wearing black nitrile gloves holds a tattoo machine against a person's upper arm while the piece is being worked on. The existing black and grey design shows a figure with wing-like shapes, with shading in the darker areas. The person lies on a black wrapped table, and the framing is close, with the arm and hands filling most of the image.

Upper arm Tattoo machine Figure Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp had been dark for two nights when Nell Havers climbed the iron stairs with the tin of lamp black under her arm. Below, the sea worked at the rocks of Carrick Skerry as if it had a grudge against them. The gallery rail was furred with salt, and the winged figure cast into the lantern housing had gone green at the shoulders. That was why she had come, not to wake the light, but to bring the dark edges of the wings back to what her grandfather had shown her.

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Walter had kept the light for thirty-one years and had never let anyone else touch the figure. She was a woman with wings spread wide as a gull's, one arm raised to hold the lamp above her head. He told Nell she was copied from a figurehead that went down off the Skerry in 1893. Every keeper since had gone over her outline with a fine brush, one stroke at a time, so the wings read dark against the brass. Nell had watched him do it on her seventh birthday, his hand as steady as the clockwork.

The fog came in while she worked, thick and sudden, and the foghorn started its low complaint. She kept her hand on the brush and counted strokes the way he had, feathers in threes, until the shading on the left wing stood out clean. Somewhere under the horn the radio crackled with a trawler asking for a bearing. She let it crackle. She answered the wing.

When the fog lifted at dawn, the trawler was already round the point, and the figure on the lantern showed darker than it had in years. Nell packed the brush, left the tin on the sill, and wrote in the log in her grandfather's careful hand: Left wing done. Right wing tomorrow.