Realism-style colour tattoo of a turreted castle with glowing windows under a pale moon, with cloaked figures holding lanterns on the upper arm.

Castle at night with lanterns on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a large turreted castle with lit windows in yellow and orange, set against a pale moon and grey-brown clouds. At the lower part of the design, rocky purple ground leads to a shoreline where small hooded figures stand beside glowing lanterns. The shading is soft and painterly, with the colour dominated by purples, muted blues and warm light against the grey sky.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Castle Moon Cloud Lantern Figure Rock Window

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come closer, the lot of you, and mind the guy ropes, because the ground's gone soft since the rain and I've no wish to fish a farthing out of your pockets with my bare hands. Now. You want the castle. Everybody wants the castle. Up on the headland above Saltcombe Reach there stood a house of grey stone with nine turrets, and every one of them had a window lit at dusk, though nobody ever saw a lamplighter go up.

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Each night, when the moon came up pale as a dinner plate, the hooded folk came down the shingle with their lanterns held low. Ferrymen, the village said, though no boat ever waited for them. They walked the tideline to the rock where the water had cut a path, and they set their lights in a row along the stones, one for every person who had gone out past the breakers and not come back. Old Maud Penhallow kept the count in chalk on her scullery door. She had reached three hundred and eleven the spring her son went out for pilchards.

Maud did not go down to the shore that night. She went up. The castle gate stood open for the first time in living memory, and a man in a coat three sizes too big sat at a table in the hall, shuffling a deck of cards with no pictures on them. He told her the lanterns were not for the drowned at all. They were for the living who had lost their way home, so they could follow the light back to the cliff path. Her son, he said, had been carrying one all along, and had not yet found the way.

The lamps are still lit on that shore, my dears, and if you go down with a candle of your own on a clear night, you may see a small one waver and turn toward you. That is the one to follow. Mind the rocks. Mind the tide. And when you reach the top, say thank you to whoever kept the windows bright, because it was never the castle that did it.