A hand draws a bold black tribal gorilla design with a marker pen on white paper, a design suited to a blackwork tattoo.

Tribal gorilla design being drawn

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A hand with a marker pen is drawing a stylised gorilla standing on all fours, shown in solid black tribal-style shapes with flowing, pointed flourishes along its body and arms. The face is detailed with a brow, eyes and nose, and the body is built from sweeping black bands on a plain white background. The design is entirely black ink, and the framing shows the drawing in progress with the hand and pen visible at the upper right.

Blackwork Tribal Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fog had sat on Skerrow Rock for three days when Ruth finally admitted the generator would not hold. She climbed the iron stairs with a can of paraffin in one hand and her brother's tin of black marker pens under her arm, meaning only to chalk the tide times on the lamp-room glass where her father could read them from his cot. Her hand would not keep to the tide times. By the second hour the glass was crowded with an ape hunched on its knuckles, its brow pulled low, its back a knot of pointed flames that ran down past the rail and out of sight.

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Her grandmother had told her the fog was an animal that walked the reef on soft feet, hunting for lamps gone dark, and that you kept it off by giving it something to look at. Ruth had thought it nonsense when she was small. Now she sat with the marker cap between her teeth and drew the last of the flourishes along the ape's arm, black and sharp as cut slate, while the wind pushed at the glass and the gulls went quiet on the ledge below.

At dusk the generator coughed and caught. The lamp swung round on its bearing, and its light went out across the water and struck the glass. The ape flared on the fog like something standing up to see who had come. Far off, a trawler that had been feeling its way toward the Skerrow gap dropped its speed, swung wide, and turned for the mainland channel.

Ruth watched its lights until they were gone. Then she capped the last pen and went down to tell her father the tide was on the turn.