Black ink dotwork drawing of a tattoo design shaped as a light bulb, showing a child silhouette beside a bare tree, a full moon and birds, with no body placement visible.

Light bulb with child, tree and moon

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a light bulb outline enclosing a scene: a small child silhouette reaching up, a bare branching tree on the left, a full moon in the upper area and three birds in flight. The outline is a bold solid line, while the moon, the bulb base and the tree trunk are filled with fine stippled dots. The design is rendered entirely in black ink on white paper, with no colour.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tam was the one who taught me that a lamp keeps a whole world inside it, if you hold it the right way. He was six that winter, all elbows and questions, and he would stand on the iron stool at the foot of the stair and reach up past the lantern glass as though the beam were something he could lift off a shelf.

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Father said the lens was the only thing on Skerrin worth polishing, and he took the brass as seriously as a parson takes a psalm. Each dusk he climbed the hundred and twelve steps, trimmed the wick, and came down smelling of paraffin and salt. The gulls roosted on the gallery rail in threes, and Tam counted them aloud every evening until the count went wrong and he started again.

The night the bulb failed, the tower dropped into a grey so thick I could not see my own hands. Father was in the boathouse with a lamb that had got itself tangled in wire. So I climbed alone, and at the top I found the glass fogged and dark, and beyond it the moon sitting low over the water, pale as a coin. Three birds crossed its face, and for a moment I saw what Tam saw: the lamp as a small round room with a tree growing in it, a boy at its foot, and the light going out like a breath held too long.

I changed the bulb with numb fingers. When it caught, the beam swept the water and found the boathouse roof, and I heard Father laugh below. The dead bulb stayed warm in my palm, its filament bent like a bare branch. I kept it in my coat pocket for years, and I still have it, though I never did tell Tam what it was for.

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