Traditional forearm tattoo of a red and white lighthouse, a black-sailed ship, banners and flowers on a red sunburst, shown in four angled views.

Lighthouse and ship on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A forearm sleeve shown in four angled panels, with a red and white striped lighthouse on rocks at left and a three-masted ship with billowing sails at right. Banners with partly visible lettering, including the words hold fast, sit beside yellow flowers, a swallow and small stars against a red sunburst. Bold black outlines and solid fills are used, with red, yellow and green alongside grey and black shading.

Traditional Forearm Lighthouse Ship Banner Lettering Flower Swallow Star Sunburst Sea Rock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Carbis kept the lamp lit in the scullery window every night after the colliery whistle, because the ship her father sailed on had never come into Penzance harbour, and the women of Carn Lowen Row said that was no reason to stop. Her brother Jory worked the lower levels now. Each morning he walked the cliff path past the old lighthouse to reach the shaft head, the same salt wind in his face that had taken their father.

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The ship came in on a Thursday, though nobody had sent word. Three masts, sails grey as slate, drifting into the bay under a sky the colour of a sunburst gone bad. Mrs Rowe from the end cottage swore it was the Mary Hallow, lost off the Scillies the winter of the big fall, and she went down to the slipway in her Sunday coat. Nell didn't go. She sat on the step with the lamp at her elbow and watched a swallow dart between the rigging, the first she'd seen since March.

When the hull touched the quay there was no crew, only a strip of canvas nailed to the mainmast with a line painted in red: HOLD FAST, WE ARE NOT FORSAKEN. Jory came up the lane with his helmet still on and read it aloud, slowly, the way he read the shift notices. Then he looked at the lamp in her window, and at her, and neither of them said anything for a long while.

In the morning the canvas was gone and the bay was empty, but the rocks below the lighthouse were dressed in yellow flowers nobody could explain. Nell trimmed the wick and left the lamp burning all the same.