Pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing a striped lighthouse, a sailing ship and stormy waves framed inside a ship's wheel, in a traditional nautical style.

Lighthouse and sailing ship in a ship's wheel

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a nautical design. A striped lighthouse with a beacon glowing rays stands on rocks beside a stormy sea, while a full-rigged sailing ship with a pennant sails in front of it. The ship and waves sit inside a large ship's wheel, with the rigging, sails and rolling water shaded in graphite on a plain pale background.

Traditional Lighthouse Sailing ship Ship's wheel Wave Sea Rock Sail Flag

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 wick had gone black at the edges by six, and Joseph Penhallow was still scraping soot from the lens when he saw the barque come round Scarrow Ness with her topsails shredded to ribbons. He knew her by the pennant, a red rag the owners had nailed to the mizzen every voyage since the Crimea. Nobody carries sail that close to the rocks unless the helm has stopped answering.

Keep reading

He ran the lamp up to full, the brass rings turning, and the beam swung out over water so white with broken sea it looked like a field of gulls. Below, on the spray-slick deck, Captain Ansel Hure would have been spinning the wheel hard over, trying to bring her head away from the reef. Joseph had watched that dance for thirty winters. Some ships turned. Some did not.

At first light the sea gave up a spoke of oak, then the great wheel itself, rimmed in iron, rolling in the surf below the tower. Joseph waded out to his knees and hauled it onto the shingle. Four of its handles were gone. Inside the ring the sea had scoured a bowl of green water, and in the bowl sat a single brass bell, still rocked by the swell.

He carried it up the seventy-one steps to the lamp room and hung it beside the lens, where the morning sun caught it. Nobody came to claim it. The light stayed lit through the next winter, and every night the beam swept over the rocks while the wheel turned slowly on its nail, as if someone still had a hand on it.