Black and grey full sleeve tattoo on an arm, showing a realistic lighthouse, a woman's portrait and a rose, across the forearm and upper arm.

Lighthouse and portrait full sleeve

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A full sleeve tattoo wraps the arm, with a lighthouse and beams of light at the top, a realistic greyscale portrait of a woman with swept-back hair in the middle, and a large rose below her. Lettering or script is partly visible at the lower edge of the sleeve. The shading is smooth and detailed in grey and black ink, and the arm rests on a pale surface against a blurred wooden chair background.

Realism Forearm Upper arm Lighthouse Portrait Woman Rose Lettering Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the fire, you, and pass the bottle along before it goes cold. I'll tell you about the Skerry light, because every boat out of Port Haddow has a version of it and most of them are lies. This one is the true one, as my grandmother had it from the woman who did the washing at the keeper's cottage.

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The lamp on Skerry Rock was lit every dusk for forty-one years by Agnes Coull, who never married and never once went ashore for a dance. In the winter of the great blow, the fleet of nine boats was out past the bar when the cloud came down like a lid on a pot. Every skipper knew that beam by heart, the long white fan that swept the water and then came round again. But the lamp had gone dark, its glass cracked by a gull's dropped mussel, and the boats were steering blind toward the teeth of the rocks.

Agnes had no lamp left to light. She went up the iron stair with a bucket of paraffin and the looking glass borrowed off the parlour wall, and she turned that glass to catch whatever moon there was, and she held it up at the gallery rail until her arms shook. Those who saw it swore the light ran out over the swell like a ribbon of silver, and one by one the nine boats turned for home.

They found her in spring, still at the rail, with the glass in her hands and her hair loose and white as sea foam. Every skipper took his cap off when he passed Skerry after that, and I have never once seen my father forget it.