Black script tattoo on the side of a thigh reading for every dark night, with a single arrow and there is a brighter day beneath it.

Quote and arrow on a thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink script quote reads for every dark night above a horizontal arrow, with there is a brighter day below. The lettering uses flowing cursive strokes with a bold underline and small swash flourishes at the ends. The photograph is taken close up on pale skin, with the design filling most of the frame and a dark garment at the top edge.

Lettering Thigh Quote Arrow Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wick had been trimmed twice already and the glass was sweating when Ada climbed the last iron rungs to the lamp room. Below her the sea was a black sheet with nothing on it but the odd white tooth of surf. Her father had left her the logbook, the paraffin tally and a rule he had painted in red on the wall: never let the light gutter twice in one night. He had gone to the mainland in October for his hip and had not come back to the rock.

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The relief boat was due on Thursday. By Saturday the wind had swung north-east and stayed there, and the supply sack in the boathouse held nothing but tinned peaches and a loaf gone blue at one end. Ada counted the nights in pencil on the back page of the log, then rubbed the count out because counting made the dark longer. She talked to the lamp instead. She read the shipping forecast aloud from the old wireless until its batteries died, then recited it from memory, shipping area by shipping area, until the names sounded like a prayer.

On the seventh night the mantle split with a crack like a shot. She stood in the cold with broken mantle in her palms and thought of the spare under the stairs, which she had never once opened because her father kept it for emergencies he never named. It was there, wrapped in a seed catalogue from 1956. She fitted it by torchlight with numb fingers, and the beam swung out across the water and caught a small boat, oars shipped, drifting toward the skerry.

The boat was the relief after all, a day early, steered by a man who had seen the light die and refused to believe it. Ada hauled his line until his boots found the slip. At dawn she opened the log and wrote in her steadiest hand: Lamp lit at dusk. Stayed lit. Then, because the page had room and the sky had gone the colour of weak tea, she added underneath: brighter day.