Traditional style colour tattoo of a striped lighthouse with rays of light and a banner reading BUT ALWAYS A GUIDING LIGHT, on a forearm.

Traditional lighthouse banner on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A lighthouse with red, yellow and grey banding sits inside an arched frame with radiating rays, and a curved banner across its base reads BUT ALWAYS A GUIDING LIGHT. Bold black outlines and flat solid fills are typical of the traditional style, with a purple wash behind the tower and a red flower at the bottom. The design fills the forearm, with partial flowers and a banner from other tattoos visible at the edges.

Traditional Forearm Lighthouse Banner Lettering Ray Flower Sun rays Anchor

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 on Scarth Point came on at four every afternoon in December, and my father would stand at the kitchen sink and check it against his watch as though it might be late. We had nineteen ewes lambing early that year on the top field, and the wind off the sea was so hard it turned the milk in the churn. He never said much about the light. He only said it was the one thing on this coast that did exactly what it promised.

Keep reading

The night the snow came sideways I was out with the lamb trailer, torch clamped in my teeth, following the fence down to the gully. A ewe had gone over the wall. I could not see the farmhouse for the white, nor the barn, nor my own boots. Then the beam swept across the sky above the drift, once, twice, and I stopped and turned my face to it like a fool. I knew where I was then. I walked toward it with a wet lamb inside my coat until the ground went firm under me again.

When I got in, my father was asleep in his chair with his cap over his eyes and the kettle boiled dry. I filled it and set it back on and told him the ewe was fine. He said he knew. He said he had watched me come down the field from the window and counted my steps by the light, which was a daft thing to say, and he said it with his eyes still shut.

Years later, when the farm had been sold and the lamp was run from a control room somewhere else entirely, I still looked at the sky at four o'clock. Some habits outlast the reasons for them. My father never had those words inked on anything, and he never needed to. He just kept the kettle on and the window clear, so whoever was out in the dark would know which way was home.