Colour traditional-style tattoo on a forearm of a red and white lighthouse over the sea inside a black anchor with teal accents and a rope loop.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lighthouse and anchor on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A bold anchor design with a rope loop at the top frames a red and white striped lighthouse on a calm sea, with a pale sun and two small birds in the sky. The solid black outlines and flat fills are set against teal and grey shading on the sea and anchor flukes. The tattoo sits across the outer forearm, with the design filling most of the frame against a plain background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, sit closer, the fire's only good for another hour and I've not got to the lamp yet. You want the lighthouse at Scarrow Point, the one with the red bands, and you want the part about the rope. Everyone wants the rope.

Keep reading

Scarrow stood on the last dry rock before the Sinking Shelf, and when the sea came up in the years after the Drowning Summer, the keepers kept climbing the tower as the water climbed the stairs. Fourteen keepers. The fifteenth was a girl called Ysolde Pike who had never seen a ship and did not believe in them. She painted the tower red and white every spring so that anything out there would know it for what it was, and she painted the sun low behind it because her mother said the sun always looked tired at the end of a long watch.

One autumn a grey gull-boat came down out of the fog with its sails torn to rags and its anchor dragging a tail of weed behind it. Its crew had lost the chart, the stars and their tempers, and they could not find the channel. Ysolde hauled the lamp up at dusk and kept it burning all night on oil she had been saving for her own funeral. At first light she threw down a coil of tarred rope with a loop knotted at the end, and the anchor came up over the rail on it like a hook pulling a fish home.

The captain asked what she wanted for the rope. She told him to bring it back full of fish the day the water went down. He never did, and neither did his sons, but every spring a new boat comes out of the mist with a red and white flag on its mast, and the tower still stands where it stood, with the birds wheeling round it and the sea flat as a plate.

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