Two versions of a tattoo design drawing of a lantern lamppost with three banners reading COURAGE, DEAR and HEART, one in green and one in black and grey, in a fine line lettering style.

Lamppost with COURAGE, DEAR, HEART banners

Fine line · Mixed · Flash

The drawing shows a traditional style lamppost with a glowing lantern and a sunburst of radiating lines behind it. Three ribbon banners wrap around the post, each reading COURAGE, DEAR and HEART in a typewriter style serif. Two side by side versions are shown: the left is coloured green with blue shading, and the right is rendered in black and grey with stippled shading.

Fine line Lettering Lantern Banner Ribbon Courage Heart Sunburst

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamps on Fennick Row had been dark since the council forgot to pay the gasman, and Tobias Abara had taken to walking home from school with one hand dragging along the railings. Nell Garside heard about it from the baker, who had it from the boy's mother, and by Thursday she had her ladder, a tin of paraffin and three lengths of striped ribbon folded into her coat pocket.

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The post at the corner was older than the street. She climbed it slowly, wiping the glass with her sleeve while the wind off the canal pulled at her hair. She wound the first ribbon round the iron and tied it with the knot her father had shown her, then the second, then the third, so the words ran down the post like a sign on a coach: COURAGE, DEAR, HEART. Below her, the boy had stopped at the kerb to watch.

'What's it for?' he called up. 'It's for the walking home,' she said, and struck the match. The wick caught blue, then gold, and the old lantern hummed as the flame settled behind its panes. Light fanned out across the wet cobbles in long bright spokes, and for the first time in a week the railings on the far side of the road were clear enough to count.

He didn't say thank you. He just took the first step, then the second, keeping one eye on the ribbons as if they might tell him the next thing to do. Nell climbed down, folded her ladder and watched his small shadow stretch ahead of him, long and thin and certain, all the way to the corner.