Black and grey realism tattoo of a street lantern beside a quote in script lettering, on a woman's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Lantern and quote on a upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of an old-style street lantern with a shaded glass body and ornate metal frame sits on the upper back, with a cast shadow falling to the right. Beside it, a line of black cursive script reads "Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times if one only remembers to turn on the light". The shading is smooth and detailed, and the photo is taken from behind in a domestic setting.

Realism Lettering Back Lantern Script Quote Shadow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bulb had gone at the crossroads again, which meant I was driving the old Ketterley cutting in the dark with a torch wedged between my knees, cursing the council man who'd promised a new bulb by March. Nobody in Ferrin Wells had seen March in six years. The lamp itself was older than the road. The mining company had shipped it out in 1938, a cast-iron post with a glass lantern on top, and left it standing where the tarmac gave up and the sand took over.

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My father kept it lit for thirty years. He used to say the lamp was not for the people already home. It was for whoever was still out there, deciding which way to go. He taught me to climb the post with a rag in my back pocket, to wipe the soot from the panes, and to check the wick by smell before I trusted it with anything. I had never once asked him whether he believed it. He just kept climbing.

That night a car came over the rise with one headlight dead and a bald tyre flapping. A woman got out and stood at the edge of the light, squinting at me as if I were the thing she'd been driving toward. She said she had seen the glow from twelve miles back and assumed it was a town. I told her it was only a lamp. She laughed, not unkindly, and said that was usually what a town turned out to be.

I turned the key on the lantern and the glass caught, a warm amber that spilled across the sand. Our shadows went long and thin, stretching back along the road the way they had come, as if the light had been pointing us home all along.