Traditional colour tattoo on a forearm showing a striped lighthouse with a banner reading There is a light that never goes out, above a red rose.

Lighthouse and rose on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A striped lighthouse with a lit lantern room stands at the centre, wrapped by a green banner with the words There is a light that never goes out. Dark blue clouds and yellow rays surround the top, and a large red rose with green leaves sits at the base near the wrist. Bold black outlines and flat, saturated colour fill the design, shown on a forearm against white paper towels.

Traditional Forearm Lighthouse Rose Banner Cloud Quote

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

The fog came off the mudflats an hour before the turn, and by the time the last buoy slid past to port there was nothing ahead of the Marigold but grey and the slap of water under her bow. You kept one hand on the tiller and the other on the cold brass of the bell, waiting for the foghorn on the point to answer your own engine's grumble. Mags had gone below to sleep off the cold, the coal was low, and the tide was not waiting for anyone.

Keep reading

Your father taught you this stretch by lamplight, never by chart. A barge man who could not find the point blind, he used to say, would be found in spring at Gravesend with weed in his hair. On the last night he came aboard, coughing into his sleeve, he told you the light on the spit never went out, not in gales, not in the winter the power failed. Keep your eyes on the stripes, he said, and trust the stripes.

You did not believe him then. You believed him now, with the fog pressing damp against the wheelhouse glass and the depth sounder giving you nothing but a shrug of numbers. Then the beam came through, a smear of yellow above the murk, and swung clean across the water. You turned the wheel until the light lay square on your bow and held it there, the way he had shown you, past the bell and the black post and the silent reeds.

Mags climbed up the companionway with a blanket around her shoulders and asked whether you were lost. You told her no, and it was nearly true. Somewhere ahead a keeper's wife had planted roses along the cliff path so the men coming up from the boats would have something to smell besides salt, and you could almost imagine their red heads nodding in the wash of the light. "Not while that's on," you said, and eased the throttle back.