Black and white photo of the back of a person's head showing a small black tattoo of curved arcs and a solid shape on the neck, behind the ear.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small black arc and shape tattoo behind the ear

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of the back of a person's head, with short wavy hair pulled to one side. A small black tattoo of curved arcs and a solid dark shape sits on the neck just behind the ear. The composition is close and shallow, with a blurred speaker and keyboard in the background.

Neck Arc Ear Neck

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The relief boat leaves you on Gull Stack with a crate of tinned peaches, a logbook whose last entries slope across the page in the previous keeper's hand, and a rule scratched above the stove: never trust the light to do the looking for you. You learn the rest from the rock itself. The wind comes off the Sound with a tooth in it, and the lamp room smells of paraffin and wet wool.

Keep reading

The fog arrives on the third evening, thick as fleece. You climb the iron stair, wind the clockwork that turns the lens, and watch the beam sweep out and die against the grey. In the drawer beneath the chart table you find Harrow's pencil drawings of the sweep, curved lines spreading like rings from a dropped stone, and beside them a small solid mark where the rock itself sits. He drew the beam as an arc and the rock as a shape, as if the two had to be read together or not at all.

At two in the morning the wireless crackles with a voice you don't know. A skipper called Dessa Murray wants to know if the light is still lit. You tell her it is, though you can't see the water from the gallery. She says she can hear the horn but can't tell which way the rock lies. So you do what Harrow never wrote down. You open the shutter by hand, count the seconds, and flash the lamp in the pattern of your own surname, long and short, until a green eye blinks back through the murk, then another.

By dawn the fog lifts off the water like a sheet pulled from furniture. Dessa's boat sits well clear of the stack with her lines coiled neat on the deck. She raises one hand. You write in the log: fog, lamp, one vessel brought in. Under it, because nobody reads these logs anyway, you sign your name in the margin the way Harrow did, and the light keeps turning.