Black ink tattoo of a circular flower inside a ring of block-capital text, placed on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Circular flower and quote on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black ink tattoo shows a stylised flower with heart-shaped petals inside a bold circle, surrounded by a ring of block-capital text reading "If you look for the light you can often find it, but if you look for the dark that is all you will ever see". The linework is thick and even with solid black fill, and the design sits centred on the inner forearm against plain, healed-looking skin on a wooden floor.

Blackwork Lettering Forearm Flower Circle Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp on Scarrow Holm had been dark for three nights when Ada Lowrie finally climbed the tower with a can of paraffin and a bundle of rags. Below her the sea went on striking the rocks the way it always did, patient and rather stupid. Her father had painted the rose on the lamp housing the year she was born, a pale flower with heart-shaped petals inside a black ring, and she had never once looked at it properly until now.

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Her brother Tom had telephoned from the mainland to say the Board would send a new man in spring, someone with a proper certificate and no nerves. Ada did not want a new man. She wanted the light back. She trimmed the wick, polished the glass until her reflection vanished, and lit the mantle with trembling matches. The beam swung out over the water toward the fishing boats that had been feeling their way round the skerry all evening, and she watched it hit the spray like a hand thrown open.

For a while she stayed in the lantern room with her back to the dark and her eyes on the brass. The words ran round the rose in her father's square capitals, the same ones he had repeated at the supper table whenever she came home sulking from school. She had always thought them a bit smug. Now they seemed like instructions.

When the first boat slid into the harbour lights, its engine coughing, she went down the spiral stairs two steps at a time and left the tower door wide open, so the lamp could reach the lane.