Pencil sketch of a lantern with a candle, surrounded by leaves and berries, drawn on tracing paper as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lantern and foliage design sketch

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of an ornate lantern with a dripping candle inside, a beaded chain and a curled metal scroll on its frame. Leaves and berries wrap around the lower half of the lantern. The linework is fine and even, with small hatched shading on the base and the leaves, and the design is drawn in grey pencil with some blue accents. It is shown on layered tracing paper, with a blue pen lying across the top edge.

Botanical Lantern Candle Leaves Berry Foliage Chain Flame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lantern hung on the gatepost at Hollin Orchard from the first pick of the early apples until the last damsons came down off the wall. Nobody knew who had first lit it. Old Ada Pim kept the candle stub in a tin and said it was beeswax, because bees were the only honest things in the valley and would not lie about the weather.

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That August the pickers' youngest, a girl called Nell Corder, went into the rows after the wasps and did not come out. The men called down the slope, but the wind had got up and carried the voices off over the hedges. Ada went to the gate, lifted the lantern from its hook and set it on the path. The flame leaned away from the trees and pointed, the way a candle does when there is a draught coming from somewhere else.

Nell came out of the blackberry hedge an hour later with her apron full of elderberries and thorns in her hair. She said a man in a grey coat had walked ahead of her carrying a light, never stopping, and that whenever she slowed he lifted the lantern a little higher so she could see the leaves and the fruit hanging in them. Ada nodded as though this were ordinary. She told Nell to mind the lantern, not the man, and to carry it home herself.

The next summer the candle was still burning on the gatepost, though no one had lit it since. Nell hung the lantern up herself when the pickers came in, and the flame stood straight the whole evening, as if there were nothing out there left to find.