Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a lantern with an eye in a triangle and a banner reading WHERE WILL THIS ROAD LEAD, on the forearm.

Lantern with eye and banner on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A lantern sits at the centre of the design, with a glowing orange flame inside and an eye within a triangle at the top. A banner reads WHERE WILL THIS ROAD LEAD across the lower half, framed by green leaves and small white flowers with red splatter details. The bold outlines and saturated teal, orange, red and green ink are set against a close crop of the forearm.

Neo-trad Lettering Forearm Lantern Eye Triangle Flame Banner Lettering Leaves Flower Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third train that night ran straight through Tallow Cross without slowing, its lamps smearing across the wet platform, and I stood where Dad always stood with the paraffin lantern held out at arm's length so the driver would know the halt was still lit. Nobody had got off here after dark since the colliery shut. Dad said that was no reason to let the wick go cold.

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The lantern carried his mark, though he'd never have called it art. Years ago he had scratched a little triangle onto the brass cap and filled it with an eye, the way his mother had painted one above every door in the cottage when he was small, to keep bad luck looking the other way. Beneath it the flame stayed orange and stubborn, a thing you could trust to burn when the rain got into everything else.

Old timetable sheets were still tacked along the waiting room wall, and one had a question written across the top in Dad's square hand: where will this road lead. He never answered it. I asked it myself every evening while I trimmed the wick, and the answer never changed: the same rails, the same embankment, the same wet hedge running east.

Then a woman stepped down from the last carriage with a suitcase tied in string. She looked at the dark track, then at the flame. "Is there a road from here to the village?" I lifted the lantern so she could see the eye above the glass. "There is now," I said, and she followed the light down the cinder path, the flame steady in its brass cage the whole way.