Black script lettering reading Lights will guide runs diagonally across a shoulder, cropped at the right edge of the photo.

Script quote on the shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A single line of black cursive script runs diagonally across the upper shoulder and back, reading Lights will guide, with the final word cut off by the edge of the frame. The letters are fairly slim and evenly weighted, with solid black ink and no shading or added colour. The skin is warm brown, and the photo shows a red and grey striped top and a blurred indoor background.

Lettering Shoulder Script Word Quote

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 lamp at Skerrow Point went dark on the third night of the gale, and Tom Ashby was still three miles out in his cobble-bottomed smack with nothing to steer by but the light. I climbed the tower with the paraffin can knocking against my hip and found the wick already sooted black. My hands would not stop shaking. Above the iron door hung the brass plate my father had fixed the spring the tower was finished, the letters filed by hand so their edges caught the lamp like fish scales. Lights will guide. He had thought it a fine, sentimental thing to say. I had always thought it sounded like a dare.

Keep reading

I trimmed the wick with the good scissors, the ones Mam kept for thread, and filled the reservoir to the brim, spilling a cupful down my sleeve. The glass was cold enough to ache. I lit it on the fourth match. The beam swung out over the black water and nothing answered it for a long minute, and then a single lantern showed low and wavering off the northern rocks, bobbing like a child's toy left out in the rain.

Tom came in on the morning tide with his hat gone and a split lip, grinning as if he had outwitted the sea entirely. "Saw your light," he said. "Couldn't miss it." I did not tell him I had spent the whole night sitting beneath the lamp, reading the brass plate over and over, wondering whether my father had known how much a plain sentence could weigh when a man was counting on it.