Close-up of a fine-line black script tattoo reading light on the inner forearm, with a rainbow of sunlight falling across the skin.

Light script on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up photograph of the word light written in thin, cursive black linework on the inner wrist. The strokes are uniform and unshaded, with a looping connection between the letters. A bright rainbow of sunlight crosses the skin behind the lettering, and the blurred background is dark.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Word

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time the ferry's horn sounds off Skerrish, you will have polished the lens twice, and the gulls will still have spattered the brass. Your uncle used to say the lamp does not care how clean the glass is, only that it turns. So climb the iron stair with the rag stuffed in your pocket and the paraffin tin knocking against your knee, and do not look down at the grey water breaking on the rocks.

Keep reading

The sun comes out low in the afternoon, slipping under the cloud bank so the prisms catch it. Colour falls across the keeper's table where the ledger lies open, across the cracked window, across the back of your hand when you hold it up against the tide table. Red first, then a thin band of gold, then a green that wavers whenever the wind shifts the cloud. Your uncle copied the lens maker's name onto a card in his neat copperplate and pinned it above the stove, but it was the word beneath, written in his own hurried hand, that he kept folding and unfolding in his coat pocket the winter his eyes went.

When the light fails you will hear the first bell from the mainland boat. Strike the match, feel the wick take, and turn the crank until the beam swings out over the Sound. Somewhere out there a man you have never met is steering by it, counting the flashes the way your uncle taught you to count the gulls. Don't let it gutter. The rainbow will be gone by then, but the lamp will go on keeping its promise until morning.