Black and grey realism tattoo of storm clouds and branching lightning across a man's upper arm, with a purple top.

Storm clouds and lightning on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a dark storm cloud mass with a bright, glowing break in the centre and forked lightning branching downwards across the upper arm. The shading is soft and smooth, with fine white highlights along the lightning bolts and gradual greys in the clouds. The image is a close side view of a man in a purple sleeveless top, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Realism Upper arm Lightning Sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The glass had been falling since breakfast, and by three o'clock the sky over Scarrow Head had gone the colour of a bruise left too long to heal. My father called it a proper blow. I called it nothing yet, because he had taught me never to speak to weather until it had finished speaking to us. We climbed the iron stair together with the lamp oil and the spare mantle, and he kept one hand on the cold rail the whole way up.

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From the gallery the western cloud stood like a cliff over the water, black and folded, with one soft hole burning in the middle of it where the light had broken through. Father tapped the glass with a knuckle and said that hole was the sea's own lantern, lit for anyone foolish enough to be out. Then the forks came down. They ran from the cloud to the swell in branching threads, white as chalk, and the sea lit up under them like a net of roots pulled up from the dark.

The third strike hit the lightning rod on the gallery and the brass hummed under my palm, a sound like a kettle thinking about boiling. Father grabbed my wrist and made me count the seconds between flash and thunder. I got to four before the sky cracked open above us.

We lit the lamp early. The beam swung out across the Head, and far off in the troughs a small green light blinked back at us, then another. A trawler had found its way home by our flashing, and I stood at the glass watching it come in, counting its lamp the way I had been taught to count the storm.