Close view of a watercolour-style lantern tattoo in orange and teal on a person's forearm, with a floral dress visible beside it.

Lantern tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A lantern with a dark outline and an orange glow inside is tattooed on the inner forearm, with the face and head cropped out of the frame. The linework is loose and sketchy, and the orange and teal washes bleed softly beyond the outlines, giving a watercolour effect. The lantern sits centrally against a plain white wall and a navy floral dress.

Forearm Lantern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The steps down to the postern were slick with the week's rain, so I went down them sideways, one hand flat on the wall and the lantern held out from my skirts like a pail of milk. Its wire bail bit into my fingers. The glass had cracked twice since Michaelmas and I had mended it both times with horn and a dab of tallow, so the flame inside stood a little crooked and threw its light in a lopsided fan across the stones.

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Below us the moat had dried to a bed of nettles and broken crockery. Mrs Pennock, who kept the bailey gate and had opinions about bread, bishops and the Parliament men, said the castle had been hungry since they knocked the north tower down, and that it wanted feeding with light. I thought that nonsense until the night I came up from the cellars in a fog so thick I could not see my own boots, and only the orange glow of my lamp, bouncing off the wet ivy, showed me the way out.

Tobias, Mrs Pennock's grandson, had gone missing before supper. We found him at last in the chapel, curled under the broken rose window with his knees up and his face smeared with dirt. He had watched the light come along the wall for an hour, he said, and had not dared to call out until it stopped just outside the chapel door.

I set the lantern on the chapel step so the boy could see his way by it, and the window tracery threw its stone shadows across the grass like a net. Mrs Pennock cried, then scolded, then cried again. Afterwards I went back down for the lamp, but it was still burning where I had left it, and I have never been able to say whether I forgot to take it or whether the castle simply kept it.