Black tribal-patterned tattoo of a lion head within a sun motif, covering the upper arm of a man in a white jersey.

Lion head in sun on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black lion head with a snarling mouth and a crown-like mane sits inside a sun-shaped ring on the upper arm. Bands of bold black geometric and wave-like pattern run down from the ring to the elbow, with solid black fills contrasting against the skin. The photo is taken indoors at a three-quarter angle, with the subject's face and head cropped out of frame.

Blackwork Upper arm Lion Lion head Sun Mane

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You arrive on the rock with the relief boat already rocking away from the landing, and the outgoing keeper, Tomas Halloran, is waiting at the top of the iron stair with a ledger under one arm. He does not offer his hand. He points instead at the lantern room, where the great lens turns on its bath of mercury, and says the sun on the glass has been wrong since the spring, that it throws a mane of light instead of a clean beam, and that the Board in Edinburgh will not send a mechanic until October.

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For three weeks you climb the stair at dusk and dawn with a tin of oil and a rag. The gulls scream at the glass. You learn the clockwork by counting its weights, and by the second week you can feel the lion before you see it: the bronze ring of the sun-shaped bezel, the fat crown of prisms above the flame, the snarling gap where the shutter should close. Something in the old mechanism has slipped a tooth, and the light leaks out at the jaw.

On the nineteenth night the sea comes up white against the north side and the fog sits on the lantern like a wet sack. You stop fussing with the gears. You take the shutter off in your bare hands, wrap your sleeve around your fingers, and set the cog back by feel, turning it until the beam swings clean out over the rocks and a fishing boat somewhere in the murk answers with three short blasts.

Halloran is at the foot of the stair when you come down, the ledger still closed. He looks at your scraped knuckles, then at the window where the light is going round, steady now. "Took you long enough," he says, and it is the kindest thing anyone has said to you in months.