Traditional style flash drawing of a red and grey lighthouse with red light beams, set on rocks above rolling waves.

Lighthouse on rocks with waves flash

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A pencil and ink drawing of a lighthouse with a red and grey banded tower, a lantern room, and red rays of light spreading from the top. The lighthouse stands on a cluster of grey, shaded rocks surrounded by stylised black outlined waves. Bold black outlines are combined with grey pencil shading and selective red colour on a cream background.

Traditional Lighthouse Rock Wave Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had been coming sideways since the Tuesday, and the lamp at Scarrow Skerry had to be wound by hand because the clockwork had seized again. Mr Pelham from the mainland had promised a new spring in March. It was now the second week of November and I was the only one left to wind anything.

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I climbed the iron stair at dusk with a tin of paraffin and a rag, and I did not look at the sea until I reached the lantern room. The glass was salt-blind. I rubbed a clear circle with my sleeve and saw the red bars of the lens throwing their light out across the black water, the way they had thrown it every night since my father's time. Below me the rocks took the swell and threw it back white, and the waves folded over one another like grey cloth being shaken out.

The boat came in past the eastern reef a little after nine. I had not expected anyone, and I had not lit the lamp with any great faith, but there it was, a lantern bobbing where no lantern should be, steering by the red beam it could just make out through the spray. Its owner rowed straight for the gap between the stacks, the one my father used to mark with a whitewashed stone.

I wound the clockwork that night by hand, forty turns and then forty more, until my wrists ached. In the morning there was a note pinned to the lamp housing in a hand I did not know: Thank you for the light. Keep it burning. Mr Pelham had, in fact, sent the spring.