Black silhouette design of three police boxes of decreasing size, each with curling ornamental swirls, on a plain grey background.

Three police box silhouettes with swirls

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows three identical black silhouettes of a police box, arranged in a row and decreasing slightly in size from left to right. Each box has a small lantern on its roof and is surrounded by curling, scroll-like swirls above and below. The design is solid black on a flat mid-grey background, with no shading or gradients.

Police box Swirl Lantern Silhouette Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The first box came ashore at Saltmarrow the winter the herring failed, wedged in the surf below the breakwater with its little lamp still burning on the roof. Nobody could say who had painted it so dark, or why there were no handles on the inside of the doors. Old Bet Corran laid her palm flat on the wood and said it was warm, and that was enough for the harbour men to leave it where it lay.

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The second came the spring after, and the third the year the lifeboat was lost off Gannet Rock. They stood on the quay in a row, each a little smaller than the last, and the spray the wind threw over the wall curled round their feet like the scrolls on a fishwife's apron. When a boat ran late, the lamp on the nearest box would gutter and then flare, and the women of the town would walk down with shawls over their heads and open the doors. Inside was only dark, the smell of tar, and a telephone with no cord.

Tamsin Hollow, a net-mender's daughter, went down one night when her brother's boat, the Wren, was three hours overdue. The lamp on the eldest box burned low. She pulled the door, stepped into the dark and lifted the receiver, and heard Davy counting fathoms somewhere out past the rocks. She asked him where he was. He said, "Keep the light on, I'm following it." So she stayed inside until the dark thinned and the doors went cold under her hands.

The Wren came in at first light, low in the water and singing. Tamsin still goes down each evening to check the lamps. Davy swears the boxes shrink a little every year, as if they are walking out to sea one careful step at a time, and that when the last one is gone the harbour will finally know where its boats have been.