Realism tattoo of a tall lighthouse under stormy clouds with lightning, shaded in greys and brown tones across the back of a calf.

Lighthouse in a storm on a calf

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A detailed lighthouse rises up the centre of the design, with a railed gallery and a domed lantern at the top. Behind it, dark storm clouds and forked lightning fill the sky, and a churning sea sits at the base. Soft, smooth shading in black, grey and warm brown gives the scene depth, and the tower is rendered in fine detail with visible windows and panels.

Realism Calf Lighthouse Storm Cloud Lightning Sea Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Wind backed south-westerly at four and has not let go since. Lamp lit at a quarter past six, and by seven the glass was streaming so hard I could only see the sea by its flashes. Wound the clockwork on the lantern at half past, the old brass ticking like a clerk's pen.

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Lightning over the Scar at nine, three strokes close enough to smell. I counted the thunder on my fingers: one, and the glass hummed in its frame. The sea was throwing itself at the foot of the tower in brown sheets, higher than the first gallery door, and the rock below the boathouse had gone under foam. I wrote the bearing of the strike in the margin, though nobody reads the margin but the Board men.

Tom Ashdown's boat should have come in with the evening supply. Not a sign of it. I climbed to the gallery at eleven with the storm lamp and the glass tucked in my coat, and there in the black water, just where the reef breaks, was a single red light rising and falling like a cork. It was the Agnes, I'm nearly sure. Her lamp was swinging the wrong way for a ship making for home.

Turned my own lamp up as far as the wick would take it and kept it there until the sky thinned grey. At first light the red light was gone, and so was the reef's white collar, and in their place a plank of boat rolled in on the shingle below the wall. I have entered it in the book. Under remarks I have written: lamp kept burning. Nothing further to report.