Lamp post tattoo on a forearm

The border men had raised the post themselves, cast iron from the valley foundry, because the pass was a bad place to be caught after dark. Its lantern head had a crown of small glass panes and a cap like a bishop's mitre. Tobiah had fitted the panes so that the north side burned red and the south side burned blue, and a traveller could tell which country he had reached by the colour on the snow. When Tobiah went, the post went dark, and the smugglers began using the gap as they pleased.

His widow, Marit, had not spoken of the lamp since the funeral. Yet the men below began to notice that the oil cans in the cellar were never full on Monday and always full on Tuesday. She climbed the ladder each night in the dark, filled the reservoir from her own stock, and struck the flint with fingers so stiff she could barely close them. She told no one. When asked, she said a lamp only needed someone willing to keep it.

The clerk, Pell, followed her up one February night and found her sitting on the bottom rung with frost in her eyebrows, watching the road. He asked her why she bothered, since the gap would never tell a smuggler from a carter. She pulled her shawl tighter and said that the gap did not care which side of the line a person was born on, and neither should the light. Pell said nothing. He took the ladder's foot in both hands and held it steady while she climbed back up to trim the wick.