Traditional style colour tattoo of a red and white lighthouse with an octopus, teal waves and a yellow flower on a forearm.

Lighthouse and octopus on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A red and white striped lighthouse with a yellow lamp and yellow light rays sits at the centre of the forearm, surrounded by pale blue clouds. Red octopus tentacles curl around its base, with teal waves and a yellow flower near the wrist. Bold black outlines and flat colour fills are used throughout, against a blurred railway platform and blue sky in the background.

Traditional Forearm Lighthouse Octopus Wave Cloud Flower Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad has gone down to the slipway to shout at the tide, so I am writing this at the kitchen table with the lamp turned low, which he would call a waste of paraffin. The light has been going round since six. He still won't let me touch the clockwork, even though I am thirty-one and have climbed these stairs more times than the gulls have.

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You will remember the octopus. Dad calls it Mr Pardew, after the curate who never came back from Penzance, and he tips it fish heads off the bottom step every evening. It has grown since you left. Last Tuesday it got into the store, unscrewed the cap of the spare oil can, and was found wrapped round the drum like a scarf. Dad said it was the most sensible thing anyone had done on this rock since 1911.

Then the fog came in on Thursday, thick enough to stand a spoon in. The boat was out past the Gull Rocks and Dad could not see his own hand on the rail. The wick began to smoke and the beam dropped to a yellow smudge. I heard something slap on the stone below, then a scrape, then a slow wet climbing. Mr Pardew had come up every step to the gallery, red as a pillar box in the glare, holding the spare mantle in one loop of arm and rubbing the soot off it with another.

We had the wick trimmed by ten. The boat came in on the flood at midnight, Uncle Ted swearing the whole way up the harbour. Dad says the octopus has earned a proper name now, so I suppose Mr Pardew it is for good. Come at Easter. He asks after you, in his way, and so does the light.