Watercolour-style colour tattoo of a red and white lighthouse with light beams, teal waves and a small boat, on the side of the ribs.

Lighthouse and boat on the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A red and white lighthouse with a glowing lantern and orange light beams rises from teal and purple waves, with a small boat drawn in black outline at the base. The lighthouse is shaded with soft gradients, while the sea and boat use loose, painterly washes and bold black linework. The design fills the side of the ribs, centred on the vertical body.

Ribs Lighthouse Wave Sea Boat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Garrow had trimmed the wick at four, the way her father taught her, and by dusk the glass was rinsed of salt and the red panes caught the last of the sun. Out past the bar the Saint Brannock fleet was late. Eleven boats had gone out at first light, and the wind had backed round to the south-west an hour before the fog came rolling off the water like wet wool.

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She climbed the iron stairs with the ledger under her arm and wrote the times in pencil. Half past seven. Lamp lit. Visibility poor. Below her the swell broke white on the rocks, and every few minutes a gull came up out of the murk, looked at the lantern, and turned away. Her brother Tom was on the Gannet. He had said he would be back for supper, and he always said that.

At nine she set the lamp to its slow sweep, and the beams cut orange across the water. Something answered from the east: a single flare, then nothing. She could not tell if it was a boat or a cloud catching the light. She took the spyglass to the gallery rail and counted the dark humps coming in, one, two, on to ten. The eleventh was a small black hull, drawn plain against the foam, pulling hard for the channel with its oars knocking.

Nell went down, lit the stove and set the kettle over it. When Tom came up the steps with salt in his beard and grinning like a fool, she did not say a word about the ledger. She wrote the time beside the last line instead: Gannet home. Lamp kept. Then she pinned the page up by the door where the wind could not reach it.