Woman seen from behind kneeling at the water's edge, with a large blackwork tribal tattoo across her back and arm and red, green and pink colour accents.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Full back tattoo with tribal sleeve at the shore

Blackwork · Back · Mixed · Photo

A woman kneels at the water's edge, photographed from behind with her hands raised to her head. Her back and upper arm are covered by a large tattoo of black and grey tribal ornament, with swirling bands, scrolls and a column of geometric panels. Colour appears in the centre of the back, where red and pink floral motifs and green and yellow feather-like shapes sit beneath a cluster of small stars.

Blackwork Back Upper arm Forearm Tribal pattern Star Floral Feather Ornament Sleeve Back piece Beach Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The keeper's daughter at Skerry Point had been told the sea kept count of everything. Her father lit the lamp each dusk and wrote the number of ships in his ledger, and when the wind came from the west she counted the stars as they came out over the water, because that was what her grandmother had done and nobody had asked her to stop.

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One night a grey feather drifted down the stairwell through the open hatch, then another, then a whole sheaf of them, until the lamp room was full of soft shafts that caught the beam and threw it back in green and yellow. A heron stood on the rail. It said nothing. It only looked at the stars she had counted, and then at the sea, where a small boat was rowing without oars.

She climbed down the rocks in her nightgown with a coil of rope and a red lantern. The boat held a man with a bundle of cloth across his knees, patterned with scrolls and panels like the ridges of a shell. He had come from the far side of the sound looking for the one light that never went out. She tied the rope to the bow and asked him what he wanted. He asked her how many stars she had counted. She told him seven. He said that was how many times the sea had taken his brother, and that he had come to return the feathers.

They sat on the wet stones until the beam swept round once more. When the sun came up, the boat was gone, and on the rock lay a single red bloom, pressed flat by the tide. Her father found it that morning when he opened the ledger, lying between the ships. He wrote nothing beside it, and the light kept burning.