This paper is concerned with solving ill-posed tensor linear equations. These kinds of equations may appear from finite difference discretization of high-dimensional convection-diffusion problems or when partial differential equations in many dimensions are discretized by collocation spectral methods. Here, we propose the Tensor Golub--Kahan bidiagonalization (TGKB) algorithm in conjunction with the well known Tikhonov regularization method to solve the mentioned problems. Theoretical results are presented to discuss on conditioning of the Stein tensor equation and to reveal that how the TGKB process can be exploited for general tensor equations. In the last section, some classical test problems are examined to numerically illustrate the feasibility of proposed algorithms and also applications for color image restoration are considered.