Black and grey realism tattoo of a lighthouse beside crashing waves and a stormy sky, across the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lighthouse and stormy sea on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A lighthouse stands on a stone base beside a churning sea, with a small sailing ship on the horizon at the right. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft grey gradients in the clouds and heavy contrast in the breaking waves. The composition fills the upper arm, with dark storm clouds and a light beam rising behind the tower.

Realism Upper arm Lighthouse Wave Storm Cloud Sea Ship Sky

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

Sit down, sit, the kettle's on and the storm won't finish before the tea does. You want to know why the old light at Scarrow Point keeps its face to the sea and its back to the border? My father told it wrong and his father told it worse, so you'll have it from me.

Keep reading

It was the winter of 1911 and Agnes Dunmore had the lamp. The Sallow brothers ran tobacco and lamp oil across the shingle below the wall, and everybody in Scarrow pretended not to see the carts. Agnes saw. She kept the ledger, every crate and every name, because a keeper writes down what the sea gives back. That night the wind came round to the north-west and the sea went white up to the breakwater. Somewhere past the rocks a schooner was coming in with no lamp showing, its sail a grey smudge against the cloud.

The clockwork seized halfway through the turn, so Agnes wound the great lens by hand, her knuckles split on the brass, the beam swinging out over the waves like a thread pulled tight. The schooner's master saw it and hauled off the rocks. He lived to tell it to a customs man, who came up the cliff path the next morning expecting smugglers and found only a wet logbook and a keeper asleep at the foot of the stairs.

The brothers' crates were still on the shingle. Agnes's ledger had one line for that night, in her square hand: Lit for whoever was out there. Not for the men with the crates. Ask the tower which way it faces. It still faces the sea, and the wall at its foot is still standing, and you'll hear nobody in Scarrow say a word about the border after dark.