Black ink drawing of a lighthouse within stippled clouds, with a compass rose below it on waves, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Lighthouse and compass rose design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A lighthouse with a lantern room and a sunburst behind it sits within an arched frame of clouds. The clouds and sea are built from stippling and dense black shading, while the lighthouse tower is left mostly white with simple horizontal bands. A compass rose rests at the base on wave lines, and the drawing is in black ink on off-white paper.

Dotwork Blackwork Lighthouse Compass rose Cloud Wave Sunburst

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp at Scarrow Point had not been tended by anyone with a proper watch since the spring the Hallam boy went out for mackerel and never came back. Mrs Ada Penhale climbed the sixty-one steps every dusk anyway, a tin of paraffin under one arm and her husband's spectacles in her apron pocket, because the book said the light was to be shown from sunset to sunrise, and in nineteen years she had never found a reason to disobey a book.

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In October of 1957 the fog came in off the water like wet grey wool, piling against the cliffs until the lamp's beam could barely reach the shingle. Ada wiped the glass with her sleeve and looked down at the chart-room wall, where Tom had painted the compass rose the year they married. Eight points, sharp as a fishhook. The fishermen of Scarrow said it was the only true thing in the village, and that a man could steer by it even when he could not steer by anything else.

A little after midnight she heard the bell buoy clang out past the rocks, then a boat's engine coughing somewhere beyond the white. She could not see Eli Carne's lantern, only hear him swearing at the tiller. Ada turned the wick higher until the flame smoked, poured the last of the paraffin in with her hands shaking, and began to sing the hymn Tom used to hum when he could not sleep. She sang it through three times. The engine grew louder, then steadier, and at last a pale shape nosed out of the murk below the point.

By sunrise the boat was tied up at the slipway. Eli came up the steps with a bucket of mackerel and did not say a word about the fog or the hymn. At the top he left one fish on the step beside her tin, silver and still cold, and went on down to his cottage. Ada let the lamp burn on until the sun came up through the cloud like a coin through water.