Pencil sketch design of a lighthouse set inside a ship's wheel, with rays, scrollwork and a ribbon banner below, drawn on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lighthouse in a ship's wheel with banner sketch

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a lighthouse with a small eye at its top, set within a ship's wheel with radiating rays behind it. Scrolling ornamental details and a ribbon banner with curled ends sit beneath and around the wheel. The linework is loose and sketched, with light shading and no colour, and the design fills the centre of the page.

Neo-trad Lighthouse Ship's wheel Banner Eye Scrollwork Ray

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 beacon on Harrow Deep had not been lit since my grandmother's time, so when the wheel-shaped drift came through the ring gap, I was the only one on the watch deck who thought to climb up and check the lamp housing. The brass eye at the top of the tower still opened and closed on its hinge, with a glass lens behind it, and it had kept me company through three years of dead shifts.

Keep reading

Mara Ilunga, who ran the salvage crew, said the wheel was older than the station. Its spokes had been welded to a hull that no longer existed, and they still turned, slowly, when the dust tide moved past. Someone had scratched a banner into the rim in letters nobody could read, curled at the ends like a ribbon, and I traced them with my glove until the ink flaked away under my thumb.

On the last night of the cycle the lamp caught something. Far out, a single pinprick answered it from the dark, then went out, then came back in the same rhythm, three short and one long. I wrote it in the log under the date and didn't tell Mara, because the log was for whoever came after us, and I wanted to be sure it said what I thought it said before I gave anyone hope.

By morning the answer had changed to a pattern I knew from my own training: our station's name, spelled out in old code. I rubbed the lens clean, turned the wheel's brass spoke one notch to the left, and kept the light on.