Two side-by-side photos of black lettering tattoos on the back of a neck, reading you see all my light and and you love my dark, in a serif typeface.

Two-line quote tattoo on the back of the neck

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The left photo shows the words "you see all my light" and the right photo shows "and you love my dark", both tattooed in a serif typeface on the back of the neck. The lettering is solid black with crisp edges, and the ink sits in a single horizontal line on each side. The two images are placed side by side, with hair and the top of a striped top or dark jumper framing the shoulders and neck.

Lettering Neck Quote Word Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp at Skerrow Point has to be trimmed every evening at dusk, and Tom Eddowes has never once let me do it, though I have the steadier hands. He says the wick knows his fingers. I tell him wicks know nobody. We have argued about this for eleven years in the kitchen above the lamp room, and I have come to think the argument is the point of us.

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The night the Ellen Marr went onto the Whitlaw rocks, I stood at the gallery rail with the big glass and counted her lights going out one by one. Tom was down on the shingle with the lifeboat men, and the sea was the colour of slate and getting darker. I could not see him. I could only see the beam sweep round, lighting the spray white and then leaving it black, and I thought, he will be out in the dark part, and I will have to be the one who keeps the light going for him.

He came up the path at four with his oilskin split and salt in his eyebrows. He did not say anything. He took the trimming scissors from the drawer, sat down with the lamp between his knees, and asked me very quietly whether I had kept it burning. I said I had. He said, you see all my light, Mags, and I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the step.

Forty years on, the lamp is automated and the cottage is let to walkers who leave the blinds open. Tom is in the churchyard above the bay. I still climb to the gallery on the anniversary of the Ellen Marr and say the other half aloud to the dark water, the half he always gave back to me, because someone should.