Woman portrait sleeve with red umbrella

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A woman's face in profile fills the upper part of the sleeve, drawn with loose black sketch-like strokes that cross over the face and hair. A vertical red streak runs down the left side, and a red umbrella and a faint row of stairs and figures sit lower on the arm in grey shading. Most of the design is greyscale with the red used as a strong accent.

Realism Upper arm Woman Portrait Face Umbrella Figure Brushstroke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Margit had counted the stairs every night for eleven years, one hundred and sixty-three of them, iron treads worn to a dull shine in the middle where a century of boots had landed. Tonight the wind came off the Skerries sideways and rattled the glass, and she climbed with the red umbrella furled under her arm because her sister had left it on the landing in April and she had never had the heart to throw it out.

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At the top the lamp was already turning. Her father had taught her that the light did not need watching, only tending, and she believed him more than she believed the wireless men in town who said the station would be automated by Christmas. She wiped the lens with a square of chamois, trimmed the wick, and looked out at the water, black and furrowed, where a fishing boat should have been and was not.

Then she saw it: a single red spark low on the swell, bobbing where no sensible skipper would be. She had no radio to call it in. She had only the lamp and the umbrella. She unfurled the umbrella in the gallery, held it high above the rail with both hands until her wrists ached, and waved it slowly across the dark, the way her sister had once waved it at the ferry from the pier, laughing, when they were girls.

The spark turned. It came towards the rocks in a long, careful arc, and she kept the red canvas moving until a hull came out of the murk and a torch answered from the bow. Margit went down the stairs slowly, counting again, and did not once look back at the light she had kept.