Close-up of a black script tattoo reading happiness depends upon ourselves along the left ribs, with a hand holding up a lilac top beside it.

Happiness quote in script on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a side of the torso with a black script tattoo of the words happiness depends upon ourselves, set in three lines that slope across the ribcage. The lettering uses bold, slightly uneven strokes with some letters overlapping and a soft shadow of ink. The image is in colour with a lilac top held up by a hand, a pink background and a white radiator to the left.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit where the stove can reach you, boy, because those stairs will have taken the warmth out of your knees. Forty-one years I kept the light at Scarrow Point, and the thing I learned on the worst night of them wasn't the night the gallery rail went over the cliff. It was the night the relief boat didn't come.

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My brother Ned was meant to take the watch that Tuesday. The sea got up ahead of him, the way it does on this coast, grey then white then black, and his boat stayed tied in Harrow Cove. I sat at the lamp with the clockwork running down under my hands. Every hour the weights sank, and every hour I had to haul the chain up again, hand over hand, and I thought of all the men who'd once trusted someone else to do it.

Ned sent word by the Thursday post. He was sorry, the road was gone, he'd come as soon as he could. I wrote back that I'd manage. I didn't know whether I meant it until I'd done it, and then I found I'd been doing it for three days already.

His letter came in the spring with a joke about his knees and an order for lamp oil. I kept it in the drawer with the wick trimmers. After that I climbed the stairs myself every evening and took the chain in both hands, and the beam swept out over the water as steady as anything I've ever made.

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