Traditional style lantern tattoo with a lettered banner and rope border on a man's forearm, resting on a bar.

Lantern and banner tattoo on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A man in a checked shirt rests his forearm on a bar, showing a colour tattoo of a lantern or lamp with a banner reading lettering across its centre. A red rose and rope border surround the design. Bold outlines and flat fills in red, blue, yellow and green give it a classic American traditional look, and flash sheets are pinned on the bar below.

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come closer, the lot of you, and mind the step, for the old flagstones of Carrow have swallowed better men than you. In the kingdom of Hesketh-under-Mere, which you will not find on any map a clerk has drawn, the lamplighters went out each dusk with a brass lantern in one hand and a coil of tarred rope over the shoulder, because the fog came up off the water thick enough to drown a horse. Old Ambrose Tull carried the finest lamp in the harbour quarter. Its glass was ringed with rope, and a red rose had been painted on its base by a girl who loved him for one summer and then sailed for the Ninefold Isles.

Keep reading

Now, Ambrose had a habit. Each evening he would stop at the tavern called the Drowned Anchor and read aloud from a sheaf of letters he had never sent. Words, he said, were lanterns for the mind, and a man who kept his best ones hidden was like a lamp with the wick cut short. The sailors laughed, but they listened. Most of them owed Ambrose something, for he had walked them home on nights when the mist swallowed the quay whole.

The winter the fog did not lift, a boat came in with no crew aboard, only a child asleep under the tiller and a rope tied in a knot no one in Hesketh could undo. Ambrose sat beside her until morning, reading from the unsent letters one after another, until the grey light came through the window and she woke and asked him, very politely, what the rose was for.

He told her it was for remembering where the light came from. Then he trimmed the wick, and the lamp burned steady all that year.

More like this

Man with crossed arms in a navy T-shirt showing a black and grey traditional-style sleeve, with a bird on the forearm and a rose on the lower arm.
Crossed arms with bird and rose tattoos
Black and grey tattoos of a feather, a skull and a small script word on a man's forearms, with arms crossed over a white shirt.
Feather and skull tattoos on crossed forearms
Black and grey shaded flower tattoo on the wrist of a man wearing a brown strap watch, with a red sweatshirt and navy trousers.
Shaded flower tattoo on a wrist
Black fine line script lettering runs down a person's forearm while they hold a vintage twin lens camera against a grey door.
Script lettering on a forearm
Black fine line tattoo of three bands around the wrist, a single band and a rectangle outline on a raised forearm against a white brick wall.
Fine line bands and rectangle on forearm
Fine line black outline of a world map tattooed on the inner wrist of a palm-up hand resting on a wooden surface.
Outline world map on inner wrist
Black and grey tattoos on a woman's upper arm and forearm, including a tall figure, an ornate rose and a winged design, with her face turned away from the camera.
Figure, rose and wings on a woman's arm
Black and grey realism tattoo on a forearm, showing an animal head with a mane beside three lines of Latin lettering, with a blurred background.
Latin lettering and animal portrait on a forearm
Overhead view of two colour-tattooed arms, one typing on a laptop and the other writing in a notebook, with sleeve tattoos on the forearms.
Tattooed arms working at a laptop
Hand-drawn orange seahorse with a black outline and a blue wash behind it, with rising bubbles above, on the forearm near the elbow.
Seahorse with bubbles on a forearm
Close view of a forearm with a bold geometric tattoo in black, orange and teal, held beside a woman's hands holding silver hoop earrings.
Geometric tribal pattern on a forearm
Small dark tattoos on the hands of a man seated on a wooden stool in a grey chambray shirt, dark jeans and brown leather boots.
Hand tattoos on a seated man

From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.