Close photo of a fine line black script tattoo reading aloha, followed by wave lines, on the forearm.

Aloha script with waves on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A thin black script reading aloha runs along the forearm, with the final letter trailing into a row of wave-like curves. The linework is fine and even, with no shading, and the ink appears uniformly dark against the skin. The photograph is taken at a low angle with a warm, blurred background of orange and yellow tones, which keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Script Wave Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The relief boat was late again, so I was still on the gallery with the lamp unlit when Mrs Penhallow's grandson came up the stairs with the post. He had a tin of peaches under one arm and a postcard he would not let me read until I had signed for it. The picture was a surfer on a blue wave. Across the bottom, in my sister's looping hand, was the word aloha, and beneath it a row of curls drawn quickly, the way you draw water when you have never once stood still in it.

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Marnie sent those cards from Oahu every spring for eleven years, always the same word, always the same sea. She had gone out on a Newlyn trawler at nineteen and I had stayed on the rock to keep the light, because somebody had to climb the hundred and twelve iron steps at dusk and wind the clockwork that turned the lens. Our father had done it before me, and his father before him, and I had never once thought of it as a choice. I thought of it as weather.

This card had no picture. The word was there, and the waves, and under them, pressed hard enough to tear the card at one corner: Tom, the water here is warm enough to forget the cold. Come and see it before I'm too old to be pleased about it. I read it three times at the kitchen table while the tide came in grey against the landing rocks, and then I put it inside my coat.

At dusk I climbed the hundred and twelve steps, wound the clockwork, and watched the beam go out over the Atlantic in its slow arcs, the same curls the swell kept making against the shore. I took a stub of pencil from my pocket and wrote back the only word I could think of that meant both hello and goodbye, then sealed it for the morning boat.