Hand raised against a black background with a small black dotwork tattoo on the inner wrist and a silver ring on the middle finger.

Small dot cluster on the wrist

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hand is raised against a black background, with a silver ring on the middle finger. A small cluster of black dots sits on the inner wrist, arranged in an irregular pattern across the skin. The dots are crisp and evenly sized, and the rest of the image is in natural skin tones against the dark backdrop.

Dotwork Forearm Hand Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The relief boat wouldn't come until the tide turned, so I spent the morning on the gallery with a tin of brass polish and my sister's old telescope, counting the fishing smacks as they rounded the Scarrow shoal. Nine of them, one more than yesterday. Dad had kept a tally on the lintel in pencil for thirty-one years, and I kept it now in pinpricks of soot, one dot for each boat home, because the lime wash was too thin to take a proper mark.

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The dots on my wrist were Dad's idea of a joke. He'd tapped them there the summer I turned sixteen, copied from the star chart he chalked on the watch room floor, the scatter of seven he could name without looking. I hadn't thought about them until the letter came, Admiralty stamp and no return address, saying the light would be automated by spring. Nobody tells you what a keeper does with her hands once the lamp has nothing left to keep.

So I went up at dusk and wound the clockwork by hand, the way he taught me, and sent the shutter across the water in the pattern on my skin: a short cluster, a gap, a longer cluster, a gap. Out past the shoal, a smack I didn't recognise flashed back twice, slow and careful, the way a stranger signals when they are finding their own way in.

By the time the relief boat came, all nine were tied up in Scarrow harbour and the light had gone out for the last time with a faint hiss I'd not noticed in years. Dad's tally stayed on the lintel. I left it there, dots on the lime wash, for whoever counts next.