Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a lighthouse, stars and clouds inside a bottle, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lighthouse in a bottle on an upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A corked bottle holds a night scene with a lighthouse on a rocky islet, a beam of light sweeping left, and small stars and a crescent moon in the sky. The shading is built from dense stippled dots, with bold outlines on the bottle and clouds, and the tattoo is entirely in black ink and grey tones.

Dotwork Upper arm Bottle Lighthouse Star Cloud Moon Sea Wave Night sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth, you will not credit what Mr Abbott left behind in room four. He skipped on Tuesday owing a fortnight's board, took the good brass lamp from the hall, and left a corked bottle on the sill with a scrap of sailcloth wedged in its neck. I meant to tip it onto the midden, but when I worked the cork loose with a hatpin there was a folded page inside, and I have not stopped thinking about it since.

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It is a page from a keeper's log, written in pencil in a small careful hand. The beam at Scarrow Point failed on the nineteenth, the wick gone black as liquorice, and he climbed the seventy-two stairs with one candle, counting stars through the lantern glass to keep from thinking. Seven at ten o'clock. Eleven by midnight. Then the moon came up thin as a fingernail, and he wrote that it looked like something a man ought to be able to mend. The last line is a single word, Sea, underlined twice.

I walked up to the point after dinner with the bottle wrapped in my apron. The tower is dark and the cottage has a board at the gate. Mr Hale at the chandlery says the keeper was Tobias Wren, who went out in a borrowed boat in March and was never found. I did not know what to do, so I came back down the cliff path and set the bottle on the sill in room four, where the lamp used to sit.

Tonight the sea fog rolled in thick and the house went quiet, so I lit a candle and stood it behind the glass. The bottle threw a small clean beam across the wallpaper, sweeping left, the way the page said it should. I watched it three times before I went up to bed. Come at Whitsun if the trains run, and bring your good shoes. You will want to see it. Your loving sister, Edie.