Sketched woman and butterflies on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A sketched woman in profile wearing a headband fills the upper arm, with black butterflies, a faint moth and a skull-like form with feathers below her. Delicate grey linework is combined with loose teal circles and splashes of colour, and thin geometric lines cross the design. The woman in the photograph wears a black sleeveless top against a plain blue-grey background.

Fine line Upper arm Forearm Woman Profile Headband Butterfly Moth Feather Skull Geometric line Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the stove, because this is the part where my voice goes thin. Every autumn the moths came up off the marsh and climbed the Skerrow light as if they had an appointment. Old Mrs Abernethy kept the lamp then, and she swore the big grey ones were the drowned men's wives, come to check the glass. I never believed her. But I believed the feathers, because they turned up on the gallery rail each morning, sooty and fine, and one had a blue stain on the quill as though it had brushed the teal paint on the lantern door before it flew.

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Her daughter Ines, sixteen and sharp as a fishhook, decided she would catch one. She sat up in the lantern room with a pencil and a sheet of tracing paper, drawing every moth she could not net, and the lines she made were not quite lines. She ruled them from the lamp to the horizon, from the church spire to the mooring buoy, until the paper was a web of bearings. "A keeper's girl draws the way the light goes," her mother said. Ines drew a woman in profile, hair pinned up under a beaded band, gazing out past the rocks.

Then came the fog, thick as wet wool, with two cutters still out past the Hollin Bank and the wick burning low. Ines carried her drawing down to the gallery and held it against the glass. The moths came in their dozens, settling on the paper, black wings on the woman's sleeve, a dab of teal over her head where the circle of light fell. The beam pushed through the thin paper and the moths and the ruled lines together, and the cutters followed it in, one bearing at a time.

Mrs Abernethy pinned that drawing above the stove, where it stayed until the damp got into it. "Every light needs a face to look at it," she said. Nobody told her it was rubbish, because both boats came home.