Black and grey tattoo of a black cross with shaded angel wings on the side of a thigh.

Cross with angel wings on a thigh

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black cross sits centred on the thigh, with a pair of shaded angel wings spreading out on either side. The cross is solid black with clean, straight edges, while the wings use grey shading and feather detail. The photo is taken close up against a plain skin background, with a person's hand and dark clothing at the edges of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp on Scarth Point had burned crosswise for nine winters before anyone on the mainland thought to ask about it. Tobias Kemp, keeper of the light, said the Dutch glassmakers had ground the lens that way, and the inspectors who came out each spring were too seasick to argue.

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It was his daughter Marah who set the shutter, the autumn the Mercy Anne went onto the Teeth in a sou'wester. She was fourteen and had no business on the gallery stairs in the dark, but she climbed them anyway with a hammer in her apron pocket and two sheets of tin beaten thin at Hollin's forge. She bent the tin into wings and nailed them either side of the iron bars, so the beam fanned out wide over the water and narrowed to a single upright stroke where the reef opened.

Three boats came in that night, the Mercy Anne not among them. The skipper of the Gannet swore he saw a cross of light standing on the sea with feathers spread either side of it, and he put his helm over where it pointed and found deep water. He said the feathers were what kept him steady, because a plain beam would have looked like every other lamp on that coast.

Marah is an old woman now, and the shutter still hangs on the gallery rail, its tin gone grey as a gull's back. Each dusk her grandson unhooks it, rubs the wings with his sleeve, and fixes it back before he lights the wick. Nobody on Scarth Point has ever asked him to do it. He says the sea knows the shape it was built to, and it will not trust anything else.

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