Neo-trad style tattoo of a black lantern with a multicoloured geometric stained glass panel on the calf.

Stained glass lantern on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A lantern with a dark metal top, finial and base sits upright on the lower leg, with a tapering point at the bottom. Its centre panel is filled with a multicoloured geometric star pattern in red, orange, yellow, purple and blue, while the frame and metalwork are rendered in black and grey shading. The tattoo is shown close up against a grey pavement and dark trousers, with the design filling most of the frame.

Neo-trad Geometric Calf Lantern Geometric pattern Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lantern had been Ada's father's before it was hers, and the glass in its sides had come from a chapel near Thrapston that was pulled down the year before the war. Ada knew the star by heart: six points folded over one another, red bleeding into gold wherever the light caught it. Her father said the lantern was for finding the way home, though he never said which home he meant.

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On the night the ewes began lambing early, snow had been falling since teatime and the yard lights had died with the cable. Ada took the lantern off its nail by the back door, struck a match twice before the wick caught, and set off across the frozen field towards the barn. Each step crunched. The glass threw colour onto the snow, so for a few yards the field looked stained like a window.

Inside the barn the cold hung in the rafters. She found the first ewe down in the straw, straining. The lantern's black iron cage swung from a hook, and the coloured light moved over the wet wool and the lamb's pale legs. Ada worked with her sleeves pushed up, talking low the way her father had taught her, until the small slick body slid free and began to shake its head.

Afterwards she sat on an upturned bucket with the lamb across her knees and watched the star pattern tremble on the boards. Her father had been right about the lantern, she thought. It did not light the whole yard. It only lit enough of the way to reach the next gate.