Colour tattoo on a lower leg showing the outline of the state of Maine filled with a lighthouse on rocky shore, a compass rose and the word MAINE, with a banner reading the way life should be.

Maine lighthouse and compass rose on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows an outline of the state of Maine filled with a lighthouse, red-roofed buildings and a rocky coastline under a pale blue sky. A compass rose sits at the lower right, and the word MAINE runs across the bottom beneath a scroll banner carrying the script line the way life should be. The lighthouse and coast are shaded with soft gradients in blue, green, tan and red, while the banner and lettering use bold outlines and flat fills.

Traditional Realism Calf Lighthouse State outline Compass rose Banner Script Building Sea Sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The letter had been on the hall table for three days, propped against the brass bowl where the guests dropped their keys, and Maud had walked past it so often she could have recited it. Mr Haskell from the mainland wanted two rooms facing the sea from the first of June, and he wanted, he had written in a hand like barbed wire, the one with the lighthouse view, as it had been promised him in 1911.

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No such promise had ever been made in this house. But her mother had said it to every gentleman who came up the lane with a cough and a suitcase, and so Maud went up the stairs with a dustpan and a bucket of vinegar and began, very carefully, to make the promise true. She scrubbed the sash windows until the glass gave back the cliffs. She hung the good linen where the salt wind could get at it. On the third morning she found a cracked compass rose painted on the underside of a bedroom drawer, the red points faded to pink, and she sat on the floor with it in her lap for longer than she meant to.

Mr Haskell arrived on the evening tide, soaked and cross, and asked at once which window was the lighthouse one. Maud took him to the top of the stairs and pointed. Beyond the headland the beam was already turning, pale against the blue dusk, sweeping over the rocks and the little white islands and the boarding house roofs. He stood there a long while without speaking.

"Well," he said at last, not unkindly. "It's the way life should be, isn't it." And he went in and shut the door, and Maud went downstairs to lay the table for two.