Colour tattoo of a genie lamp with teal smoke forming a Mickey Mouse shaped gap, on the lower leg.

Genie lamp with smoke on a leg

Calf · Mixed · Photo

A red and pink genie lamp sits at the bottom of the design, with wispy teal and blue smoke rising from its spout. The smoke curls upwards and loops around a Mickey Mouse head shape left as untinted skin, and the smoke and lamp are softly shaded rather than outlined in heavy black. The tattoo is shown close up on a light-skinned leg against a blurred grey background.

Calf Smoke Mickey mouse

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags Tolley had mended pots in Bellhaven for thirty years, and the brass lamp that came in on the Tuesday tide was the ugliest thing she had ever been asked to polish. Its spout was bent like a heron's neck, and someone had scratched a crescent moon into the base. "Fetched up in a net off the breakwater," said the lad who brought it, not looking at her. "Smoke's still in it, I reckon."

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She lit the spirit stove to warm the solder, and the lamp answered with a thread of teal smoke that climbed the shop ceiling, wandered over the fish-scale tiles, and came back down in loops. Nothing in the loops was accidental. Each curl folded round a small empty space, two round ears and a broad round head, the shape a child draws when asked for a wish. Mags had seen that shape once before, painted on the sail of her late husband's boat by a man who never paid his mooring.

The smoke settled into the lamp's rim and spoke in the voice of wet rope. "Three wishes, or one good story, whichever you're short of." Mags had no wishes. She had a leaking roof and a son in Plymouth who rang on Sundays and never said what he wanted. So she said, "Tell me the story, then, and I'll mend you after."

It told her about a harbour where every boat carried a lamp, and every lamp kept a genie paid in small kindnesses. The genie had grown bored of granting wishes and taken to shaping its smoke into pictures just to see who would notice. By the time the kettle boiled, Mags had stopped minding the solder. She set the lamp on the sill, where the morning tide came in under the door, and watched the teal curl out, pause, and lift its ears in the light.