Colour traditional tattoo of a red and white lighthouse among waves and palm trees, with the words THE SEA WAS ANGRY THAT DAY beneath, on an upper arm.

Lighthouse and stormy sea on an arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A striped lighthouse with a red beacon stands on rocks beside palm trees, framed by a scalloped cloud outline, with birds flying over a dark, churning sea. Bold black outlines sit around flat, saturated blue, teal, red and brown fills, with some shading on the waves and rocks. The lettering beneath reads THE SEA WAS ANGRY THAT DAY in black capitals, and the blurred pink flowers behind the arm keep the focus on the tattoo.

Traditional Upper arm Lighthouse Wave Sea Palm tree Cloud Bird Rock Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You count the lamps from the top of the spoil heap, the way your father taught you when you were small enough to ride on his shoulders. Two lights on the bay: the beacon on Carrack Rock blinking red through the rain, and the lamp at the engine house behind you, which has not gone out once since the Penrose shaft opened. Tonight the sea is loud enough to hear over the winding engine.

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Mrs Trewhella at the chapel gate says the boats are all in, the Morwenna and the Gull and the little dinghy that belongs to the Hosking boys. She says it like a fact she has already decided to believe, and you want to believe it too. Your brother Daniel went down to the harbour wall at six with a flask and no coat, and nobody has told you yet whether he came back up the steps.

The lighthouse keeper's wife comes up the lane with a shawl over her head. She doesn't speak. She only looks at the water and shakes her head slowly, and you understand she is saying what the old men say every winter, that the sea was angry that day and it will be angry again. You hate how sure she sounds.

At first light the cloud lifts off the point. The Gull is dragged onto the shingle with her ribs showing, and Daniel sits on the upturned hull with his hands jammed in his pockets and salt crusted in his hair. You climb down the path toward him. Above you the engine house lamp is still burning, and out on the rock the beacon is still turning, and it occurs to you that neither of them ever stopped, which is all anyone had asked of them.