Black and grey pencil drawing of a lighthouse and ornate compass tattoo design on paper, with a hand holding a pencil at the top left.

Lighthouse and compass tattoo design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed black and grey drawing of a lighthouse rising above an ornate compass with a rope border, a compass rose on its face and N, S, E and W markings. Waves, sea spray and splashes surround the compass, and a rope tail trails from its base. Shading is built from fine hatching and soft tonal gradients, and the design is shown on white paper with a hand holding a pencil.

Traditional Lighthouse Compass Rope Wave Splashes Sketch Pencil Paper Compass rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The glass had been cracked since the spring gale, and Tomas had spent three evenings with a tin of putty and a borrowed knife trying to close it before the autumn lamps went up. Mrs Pryce from the chandlery brought round a loaf and asked whether the light would hold through the fog that was coming in off the Hebrides. I told her it would hold if I kept my hands steady and my fingers out of the oil. She laughed and said that was the most honest thing a keeper had ever said to her.

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The compass on the brass shelf had belonged to the last keeper, a man called Abel Fenn, who had drawn the rose on the back of a chart and never once got north right. Tomas had found the drawing folded inside the clock case, with the words N, S, E and W written in a schoolboy's capitals, and a rope tail looping off the edge of the paper as though someone had meant to come back and finish it. Every night since, Tomas had wound the lamp and then looked at that drawing before he went down the stairs.

On the last night of October the fog came in thick enough to swallow the rocks. Tomas climbed the tower with the wick trimmed and the glass whole, and he found that the needle on the old compass, set into the gallery rail, had swung round to point straight at the lamp itself. He stood there a long while, feeling foolish and grateful. Then he struck the match, and the beam went out over the water, and somewhere below a small boat turned away from the shoals and came home.