Mountain line tattoo on upper arm

Across the sound from the light there's a ridge of hills the charts call Moel Dhu, though nobody on this coast has used that name since the war. From the lamp room you could count every notch in it on a clear day. Nessa Pryce, the keeper's daughter, used to trace it on the glass with a stub of grease pencil each morning before her father woke. One long rough line, rising and dropping and rising again, then a thin tail running off to the left where the sea took over the horizon. Her father called it foolishness. He said the hills did not need copying.

Then the fog came in October and stayed nine days, and the Bethan Rose went out for her nets and did not come back. Men walked the shingle calling her name. Nessa climbed to the gallery every dusk and laid her palm flat on the cold glass, and she didn't move until the fog thinned enough to find the ridge again, a darker grey against the grey. She set the pencil along it and said, as if to a stranger, there you are.

The Bethan Rose came in on the tenth morning under her own sail, with two men aboard who had steered by that line of hills the whole way round the point. Nessa never let anyone wipe the glass after that. You can still see the trace of it, faint as breath, if you hold the lamp just so. Mind the step on your way down, my love. It has worn smooth too.