A solid black lightning bolt design drawn on a plain beige sheet of paper, shown without any body placement.

Lightning bolt design on beige paper

Black and grey · Flash

A single solid black lightning bolt is drawn at a slight diagonal in the centre of a plain beige background. The shape has clean, sharp edges and an even fill with no shading or gradient. The composition is simple, with a large area of empty paper around the motif and a small white corner visible at the bottom right.

Lightning bolt

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been told the tower was struck three times in a century, and each time the stones fell outward, as if the lightning had been looking for the hinges of the place. Gwen at the inn says it is the iron in the walls. Her father swore it was the Almighty keeping accounts. What you know is that last spring's bolt took the east stair and left a black scorch running down the masonry like a crooked finger pointing at the sea.

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The Harcourts want the ruin cleared before the sale, so you climb with a coil of rope, a tin of lamp oil and a surveyor's ledger buttoned inside your coat. The wind up here has teeth. Pigeons lift off the sills in clattering sheets. You measure the breach, note the crumbled lintels, and then you see that the scorch does not stop at the wall. It runs through a seam of pale mortar into a recess no bigger than a bread tin, and in the recess sits a flat iron box rusted shut.

You work the lid with your penknife until it gives. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, is a bundle of letters tied with red thread, all addressed to a Mrs Ada Vane, none of them opened. The top envelope is stamped the year of the last strike. You read nothing. You hold them while the first thunder rolls in off the estuary, close enough that the rope hums against the stone, and you wait for the sky to decide something.

It does not strike again. You tuck the letters back into their oilcloth, close the box, and write in the ledger only: east stair, breach, one recess, sealed. Then you walk down the stairs the lightning spared, and you leave the bolt's old secret where the sky put it.