Black and grey realism sleeve on a forearm and upper arm, showing classical figures in drapery above a geometric labyrinth pattern near the wrist.

Classical figures and labyrinth sleeve

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey sleeve runs from the wrist up the outer arm. The upper section shows a realistic classical scene of several figures with drapery, rendered with soft shading and fine tonal gradation. The lower forearm is filled with a bold geometric labyrinth pattern in solid black lines, set against a shaded, textured area near the wrist.

Realism Geometric Forearm Upper arm Drapery Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stair at Skerrow has a hundred and seventeen steps, wound so tight around the tower that you lose your sense of up. My father taught me to climb it with my eyes shut, one hand on the cold rail, counting aloud until the count and the stone agreed. He never explained why. He only said a keeper who gets lost on his own stair will not find the rock in fog.

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The winter I turned sixteen, the relief boat was late three weeks running and the paraffin ran low. I was the one sent down to the boathouse for the spare reel. When the fog came in off the sound, I could not see the lamp I had lit myself. I stood at the foot of the rocks with the reel in my arms and heard the bell buoy somewhere to the left, then to the right, then nowhere at all.

What saved me was a ball of tarred twine my father kept on a nail by the door. He had tied one end to the lamp-room rail, and every time I went down for supplies I had paid it out behind me without thinking. I followed it back up the rock, hand over hand, the way you would follow a thread through a maze. When I reached the rail the beam was turning above me, sweeping the fog white, and my father stood on the gallery with his end of the twine knotted round his fist, shouting my name as though he had never once in his life been quiet.

I still climb with my eyes shut. The stair is still a hundred and seventeen steps. But when the paraffin runs low I tie the twine myself, and I never ask what waits at the centre, only whether the thread is long enough to bring me home.