Black and grey flash design of a lighthouse, crescent moons, flowers and a ribbon banner reading We found love in the dark, in a traditional style.

Lighthouse and ribbon banner flash design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A line drawing of a lighthouse inside a rope-edged oval, with stars, diamond sparkles and crescent moons in the sky. Below, outlined flowers, leaves and crystal shapes sit above a ribbon banner with the words We found love in the dark, and a smaller ribbon reads love in. The linework is bold and even with light grey shading, and the design is centred and symmetrical.

Traditional Lighthouse Moon Star Flower Leaves Crystal Banner Ribbon Rope Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp failed at twenty past two, and Nell knew the exact moment because she had been counting the gaps between flashes since midnight, lying on the cot with her boots still laced. Her father had climbed the iron stair an hour before with a lantern and a tin of paraffin, muttering about the clockwork. Now the window showed only black, and the gulls had stopped complaining.

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Somewhere below, a boat with no riding light was coming in blind. Nell could hear oars knocking against the rowlocks, uneven and frantic. She pulled on her oilskin, took the stair two steps at a time, and found him sitting against the wall of the lantern room with a chisel in his lap and a cut across his palm.

"Wheel's jammed on the gear," he said. "Lens turns on nothing." He had been carving the old lintel board for as long as she could remember, small things nobody read: ships' names, the day of a bad storm, once a recipe for dumplings. Above the door, in letters worn soft by salt, ran the line her mother had started the winter they married, when there was no electric on the rock and only the lamp to say where anyone was. She had died before she could finish it. He pushed the chisel at Nell. "Your hand's steadier than mine."

She set the blade against the grain, and the wood gave under it, letter by letter, until the last word was cut. Out on the water a single oar stopped knocking. Below her, the beam cranked round by hand swung slowly across the sea and found the boat, and Nell kept her eyes on the carving while it did.