Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a lighthouse under a starry night sky, enclosed in a teardrop shape on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lighthouse in a teardrop on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A lighthouse stands on a rocky outcrop within a teardrop outline, with a starry night sky above and stylised clouds on either side. Waves in the foreground are rendered with bold contour lines and fine stippled dots. The piece uses only black ink and grey tones, with dense solid black areas contrasting against the lighter skin.

Blackwork Dotwork Forearm Lighthouse Teardrop Star Night sky Cloud Wave Sea Rock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The relief boat was late again, so Hannah Dunmore climbed the spiral stairs herself at dusk, counting the iron rungs the way her father had taught her, forty-one to the gallery. The lamp room smelled of paraffin and brass polish. Below, the swell worked at the rocks of Scarrow Skerry, grey on grey, and the tide had already covered the causeway that led back to the mainland.

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She trimmed the wick and checked the clockwork that turned the lens. The lens had been ground in Paris before her grandmother was born, and its glass caught the last of the day and threw it out in white bars across the water. Past the skerry the sky was clearing. A few stars had come out above the cloud banks, and the first of them looked hard and close, like nail heads in a board.

The radio crackled with the mainland station asking whether the light was lit. She answered that it was. Then she heard an outboard coming around the point, late but steady, and a figure in oilskins lifting a crate onto the landing. Her brother Tom, with the post and a bottle of something he would not explain.

She did not go down at once. She stood at the rail and watched the beam sweep the water, striking the breakers and the clouds piled over the land, and for a moment every wave shone. Then she went down the forty-one rungs to meet him, leaving the lamp to turn on its own.