Traditional colour tattoo of a striped lighthouse with lightning bolts, grey clouds and a red rose on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lighthouse, lightning and rose on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A lighthouse with blue and purple spiral stripes glows under a yellow light beam, framed by grey clouds and yellow lightning bolts. A red rose with green leaves sits at the lower edge of the design. Bold outlines and solid fills give it a classic American look, and the colour ink dominates the composition.

Traditional Upper arm Lighthouse Lightning Cloud Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Beacon had been our lighthouse since before I was born, a painted tower of blue and purple spirals bolted to the back of the dodgems, its lamp switched on by hand every night at dusk. Dad said the stripes were the only honest thing on the whole fair. When the storm came over the showfield outside Market Rasen, the lamp went out with a tick and a pop, and every ride on the green went dark at once.

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Dad was in Lincoln with his brother, so it was me up the ladder with a spare bulb held in my teeth. Lightning walked across the sky in yellow zigzags and lit the clouds from inside, grey mountains with rain hanging off their edges. Below me the rose on the ticket hut shutter looked black in each flash. The tower swayed with every gust, and the rungs sang under my trainers.

The bulb went in. The beam swung out across the lorries, the candyfloss stall and the wet tarpaulins, then found the road, where a car had stopped with its headlights off, waiting for somebody to tell it the way in. I gave it one long sweep, then another, the way Dad did, until the car flashed its lights back twice and crept forward.

Morning came up pink over the field. The rose on the shutter was red again, its petals beaded with rain, and the lightning had gone off to bother somebody else. Dad came back at seven, climbed the ladder without a word, checked the bulb, and said only, "Good." From him that was a speech.