Traditional style tattoo of a red and grey striped lighthouse above waves and rocks, with an 'On the Rocks' banner, on the upper arm.

Lighthouse with waves and banner on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A lighthouse with red and grey diagonal stripes and a glazed lantern room sits above breaking waves and jagged rocks, with small stars scattered around it. A grey banner at the base reads 'On the Rocks' in a thin script. The linework is bold and dark, with flat red and blue-grey shading, and the design is centred on the upper arm against a dark blue sleeve.

Traditional Upper arm Lighthouse Wave Rock Star Banner Sea Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down, the kettle's only just gone off and the lift will groan for another minute. Listen. Thirty-one years I worked nights on this corridor, and every one of them the light on Scarra Head came round at the same count, one long and two short, like a man knocking to be let in.

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The winter the east wing flooded, a lad called Tomas Greig came up from the harbour with his hand crushed in a winch block. He wouldn't let go of a wet letter from his mother, and the night sister, Ruth Kendall, couldn't get it off him for the X-ray. He said the lamp on the Head had been dark a week, the keeper's oil frozen in the pipes, and that the boats were running blind. Ruth told him the boats had been running blind since Noah. He laughed so hard he had to stop, and that laugh was the last easy thing he managed that night.

Ruth sat with him through the small hours with the blind half up. The beam swept the ceiling every few seconds, and he asked her to count the flashes out loud so he'd know the sea was still there. She counted to a hundred and forty before he slept. At four the lamp came back, and the engineers said afterwards it was only a fuse, nothing more romantic than that.

So when you're on nights and the window goes white and then dark, count it. One long, two short. It isn't a warning for the ships. It's only the light telling you the rocks are where they always were, and that someone up the stair has still got the oil.