Black ink sketch of a tall lighthouse with railed galleries and a domed lantern top, drawn in loose hatched linework on a white background.

Lighthouse sketch in black ink

Black and grey · Flash

A tall lighthouse drawn in loose black ink, with a domed lantern room at the top and several railed balconies stepping down the tower. The linework is sketchy, with hatching and dense strokes on the tower base and shorter, scratchy lines on the upper galleries. The image is monochrome on a plain white background with the tower filling the centre of the frame.

Lighthouse Tower Lantern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fourth gallery rail had split again, and Walter Pell was still picking splinters from his palm when the relief boat knocked against the landing below. He counted the galleries as he climbed, the way his father had taught him at Carrick Bay: five iron balconies stepping down the tower like rungs laid on their side, each a little narrower than the one above, each a place a man could stand and believe himself safe. The paint had blistered to grey scales, and the ironwork hummed whenever the wind came off the water.

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Dennis Hale came up the steps two at a time, a telegram crumpled in his fist. The inspector from the Board would be out on the Thursday tide, and he wanted to see the lamp burning before he signed anything. Walter read the paper twice, then folded it into his breast pocket where his wife's letters used to go. Eleven years of keeping the light and nobody had ever asked him to prove it was still needed.

He climbed to the lantern room with a rag and a tin of metal polish and worked the brass until his knuckles bled into it. The lens was clouded with salt, but he cleaned it pane by pane, the way Margaret used to clean the chapel windows before Sunday. When the wick caught, the glass threw a slow gold arc across the bay, over the harbour wall, across the roofs of Hallow Cove and the lit kitchen of the baker's where somebody was already kneading for the morning.

He left the lamp turning and sat on the top step with his back to the iron. Below him the boat's wake spread out pale and quick, carrying the light away over the water toward the mainland, and for once he did not count anything at all.