Lighthouse banner tattoo on a calf

The words came in the winter of the great storm, when the lamp-glass cracked and Tobias had to climb out on the gallery with a pot of lead white and a brush, in a gale that would have taken the hat off a bishop. He painted the first banner in one long dreadful afternoon: All the light for those who wish to see. Nobody had asked him to. The Trinity men only wanted the light burning, and it was burning, through a crack in the glass and a hole in his sleeve.

Three days later the herring boat Ada May came round the Holm in fog thick as porridge. Her skipper had been steering by the bell buoy, which had gone under in the surge. He saw the banners first, pale in the murk, and read them aloud to his crew because he had never in forty years seen a lighthouse with instructions. Then he saw the lamp, faint and yellow, and understood that someone on the rock had been shouting at him the only way a man can shout across a sea.

They say the boat came home. They say Tobias went down to the landing stage the next morning and found the skipper's youngest standing there in borrowed boots, asking whether the words were meant for her too. Tobias said yes, though he had only meant them for himself, and he has been saying them to strangers ever since. The other banner, the one about home, he painted on the seaward side, where nobody could read it from land.