Black and grey realism tattoo of an old sailor in a peaked cap and pipe, with a lighthouse and lightning below, on the upper arm.

Sailor and lighthouse on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a weathered older man in a peaked cap with a thick moustache and beard, holding a curved pipe between his teeth. Below him, a lighthouse stands on a rocky island beneath stormy clouds and forked lightning. The shading is smooth and highly detailed, with strong contrast between the dark cap and the lighter skin tones of the face, and the design fills the upper arm and shoulder.

Realism Upper arm Sailor Cap Pipe Lighthouse Lightning Storm Cloud Sea Beard

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cracked glass in the lantern room had been rattling since noon, and by dusk the wind was hitting the rock hard enough to shake the pipe from old Hagan's teeth. He caught it, tapped the ash into his palm and swore at the Board in Edinburgh, the way he swore at them every storm, as though they could hear him from the mainland. Then he climbed the iron stairs one step at a time, counting them the way his wife used to count her stitches.

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Below, the sea was going white over the skerries. He trimmed the wick, wound the clockwork that turned the lens, and watched the beam sweep out over the water and fall back empty. Three nights earlier a coble had gone missing off the point, and the Harrower boys had not stopped searching. Lightning forked down behind Carrick Head and lit the whole bay for a heartbeat, and in that heartbeat he saw a small yellow light bobbing well to the south, where no light had any business being.

He did not sleep. He kept the lamp turning through the black hours, feeding it oil and muttering at the glass, and each time the lightning came he looked for that small light and found it still there, stubborn and low. Near four in the morning it stopped moving. Hagan put his pipe back between his teeth, unlit, and kept his eye on the water until grey light crept over the mainland.

At first light a sodden lad in a borrowed oilskin came up the landing steps, hands raw from the oars. The boat had struck the Teeth, he said. His brother was still in the cuddy, and they had only lived because a light had shown them where the rocks were not. Hagan looked back at the lamp, still burning pale against the morning, and said only, "Aye, well. A keeper who lets the wick go out is no keeper at all."