Black and grey realism tattoo of a lighthouse on a rocky islet with birds and clouds, placed on a person's upper arm.

Lighthouse on a rock on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A lighthouse stands on a craggy rock at the centre of the design, with seabirds flying in the sky and a shaded sea below. The tattoo uses detailed greyscale shading to show the stone texture, the lighthouse's banded tower and soft, smoky clouds behind it. The design fills the upper arm and shoulder area with a tall, centred composition.

Realism Upper arm Lighthouse Rock Bird Cloud Sea Island

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

Hold that torch steady, love, and don't go trusting the clock on the wall. Clocks on nights are liars. My old granddad used to say the same about the lamp on Skerrymore Rock, where his cousin kept the light for forty-one years. Iron stairs, a clockwork mechanism that needed winding by hand every few hours, and a sea that never once let a man sleep through his shift.

Keep reading

When the weather turned, the gulls came in off the water and crowded the rock, screaming like they had news. He'd count them through the glass to keep his head clear. Thirty-two one night, then thirty-three when the wind dropped, and he said that was a bad sign, because a bird that comes in quiet is a bird that has nowhere else to be. He trimmed the wick every hour and wrote it all in a ledger with a pencil stub he kept behind his ear.

That winter a fishing boat from the mainland was out past the reef when the fog came down thick as wet wool. Nobody had asked him to keep the lamp burning past its time, but he did, all night, winding and trimming and counting. At first light the birds lifted off the rock all at once, and under them, small and steady, was the boat, turning for home because it could finally see where the rock was.

So when that monitor starts its little song at four, you go and be the light, pet. That's all any of us are. Somebody keeping the lamp turned up for the folk out past the edge of the dark, and writing it down in the ledger after.