Traditional style flash design of a skull in a pirate hat beside a sailing ship, with an 'As You Wish' banner, a yellow flower and a crown above, on a dark teal background.

Skull and sailing ship with banner and flower

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A bold illustrated design of a skull wearing a dark pirate hat, set beside a three-masted sailing ship with cream sails and a brown hull labelled Revenge. A teal ribbon banner reading As You Wish wraps beneath the skull, with a yellow five-petal flower and green leaves below it and a small crown with pointed flourishes at the top. The linework is solid and dark with flat fills and minimal shading, set against a plain dark teal background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp at Holm Point had not been lit for three nights when the Revenge came round the skerry with her cream sails full and no moon to steer by. Old Jenet Rusk climbed the iron stairs with a tin of paraffin in each hand and her knees complaining at every step, because her husband had gone across to the mainland and the wick had been left to sulk.

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The ship put in at the slipway at first light. Her captain was a thin woman in a black hat pulled low, and she carried a crown wrapped in oilcloth under one arm, a little thing of pointed gold leaves that had once belonged to a drowned prince. She offered it to Jenet in return for the lamp. Jenet looked at the crown and then at the sea, and said she wanted nothing from a pirate except the promise that no boat would be lost on the rocks beneath her light.

The captain laughed and said that was a wish a sailor could keep. She drew a yellow flower from her coat, pressed flat between two boards, the kind that grew only on the cliff above the bay. Jenet said that was no wish at all. The captain shrugged, tore a strip from the ribbon at her cuff, and wrote on it in a neat hand: as you wish. Then she sailed out on the morning ebb, and every storm that winter the lamp burned bright and the rocks took nothing.

In spring a yellow flower came up between the stones at the foot of the tower, and Jenet never once picked it. Some said the crown still lay at the bottom of the bay, and others said the captain had only been a woman who knew what a light was worth. Jenet kept the wick trimmed, climbed the stairs each dusk, and asked nobody for anything more.

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