Black and grey realism tattoo of a lighthouse in a storm with rays of light and crashing waves, covering the inner forearm, shown from two angles.

Lighthouse and storm waves on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A lighthouse stands at the centre of the design, with a lantern room and railed gallery at the top and a tall tower below. Dark clouds and bursts of light radiate behind it, and churning waves fill the lower part of the forearm. The work uses smooth shading and fine highlights to give the stone and water depth, and the image shows the piece from two angles side by side.

Realism Forearm Lighthouse Wave Cloud Storm Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mantle split at ten past two, and by the time I had the spare in my hands the spray was freezing on the gallery rail. Dougal was below, swearing at the kettle, and I was alone up top with a box of matches gone soft in my pocket. I struck one, then another, and the third caught long enough to light the wick that had kept this rock visible for thirty-one years.

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The beam went up through the cloud bank in long pale spokes, the way it always did when the glass was clean, and for a moment I could see the whole sea laid out below me like ploughed iron. Beyond the skerry a fishing boat was labouring, her single lamp swinging wild. I could not hear her engine over the wind. I could only see that she was turning toward the gap in the rocks that the old keepers called the church door, and that she was turning the wrong way.

I kept the light steady and sent three long flashes, the signal Ewan Gray had taught me when I was a lad rowing herring boats out of Ullapool. The wheelhouse lamp blinked once, then held. I knew the boat. Mairi Ross had her father's hands on the wheel and her own steady eye on my light, and she brought the bow round into the lee of the headland as if she had been steering by that beam all her life.

When she slid past the church door into the calm water of the harbour, I turned the wick down to a glow and sat on the iron step. Dougal came up with two mugs of tea and found me laughing, which I could not quite explain to him. The light had done its work for one more night, and for the first time in my life I had watched it from the outside.