Traditional tattoo of a red and black striped lighthouse with a banner reading But Always a Guiding Light, set on the forearm.

Lighthouse with banner on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A traditional-style lighthouse sits within an arched frame, with orange rays of light radiating above it. A red and black striped tower is wrapped by three banners reading 'But always a guiding light', and small red flowers appear at the top and bottom of the design. Bold black outlines and flat fills in red, orange, yellow, green and purple make up a colour-led composition on the forearm.

Traditional Forearm Lighthouse Banner Lettering Sunburst Flower Anchor Arch

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 band had stopped for the interval and Nell Garvey was counting coats in the cloakroom at the Marine Pavilion when the lamp on Carrick Head swung round for the third time. She could see it through the back window, a white flash above the harbour wall, then dark, then white again. Her brother Tom had painted the red bands spiralling up that grey tower the summer he was nineteen, and every night since he'd gone to sea she had checked the light before she locked up.

Keep reading

Ray Dunmore came to the hatch with a ticket stub and a damp collar. He danced like a man reading a map upside down, but he had a steady voice and he asked about the light without being asked. "Is it still working?" he said. "Your lighthouse." She told him the keeper's boy had been running it since the war, and that nothing came into the bay after dark without seeing it. He nodded as though she'd given him directions.

When the band struck up again she went out onto the floor with him anyway, the waltz slow enough that she could hear the sea under the drums. Halfway round he said the Aurora had gone down off the Head in March, and her crew had rowed toward a light that wasn't there, because the lamp had failed for eleven minutes. Nell stopped dancing. Then she walked to the telephone behind the bar and rang the cottage, and told the boy to check the mechanism before the next boat came in.

When she came back, Ray was still standing by the hatch with his hands in his pockets. Over the harbour wall the flash swung round again, and this time Nell counted every one until it came steady.