Colour traditional tattoo of a red and white lighthouse with orange light beams, waves and clouds, framed by a rope border and banner on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lighthouse and waves with banner on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A red and white striped lighthouse with orange light beams stands at the centre, set against a pale sunburst, dark clouds and rolling green and yellow waves. A rope border frames the scene, and a curled banner across the top and bottom reads "I AIN'T LOST" and "JUST WANDERING". Bold black outlines, solid fills and a warm, saturated palette are shown in three views of the same arm tattoo.

Traditional Forearm Lighthouse Wave Cloud Rope Banner Sunburst Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dolores Finch counted the wagons from the gatepost of the last field the Halloran Brothers' Travelling Show had been allowed to pitch in. Six wagons, one elephant too old to sell, and a red and white big top patched at the seams like an old sail. Her brother Ned wanted to head for the coast again, said the seaside towns still paid for a band and a fire-eater. She said nothing, because the map in the caravan had a ring drawn round Pendle Point, and the ring was in her own handwriting.

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They reached the point at dusk. The lighthouse stood on its black rock with its beam sweeping slow across the water, striped like the big top and just as faded. The keeper, a thin man called Abel Rudd, came down the path with a lantern and asked whether they were lost. Ned bristled. Dolores laughed and said they were only wandering, and Abel looked at the elephant for a long while before he agreed that was a fair way to put it.

That night they played to a tent of fishermen's wives, two dogs and the keeper himself, who stood at the back with his cap in his hands. Dolores walked the wire over the rocks with the beam passing through her every few seconds, and for once nobody counted the patches in the canvas. When she climbed down, Abel was at the tent flap, nodding slowly, as though he had been shown something he already knew.

In the morning the wagons turned inland. Ned said the coast had won the argument, and Dolores let him believe it. Only when he was asleep did she unfold the map, take up her pencil and draw a second ring, further up the coast, beside a small square marked Lighthouse. Then she blew out the lamp and listened to the wheels take them north.