Black and grey Japanese-style wave tattoo covering the upper arm and shoulder, with swirling curls and shaded crests.

Black and grey wave sleeve on upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder with stylised waves, swirling curls and foamy crests. The linework is fine and the shading moves from dark grey to pale highlights, giving the water depth and volume. The waves fill the frame from the shoulder down to the elbow, with a dark backdrop behind the arm.

Japanese Upper arm Shoulder Wave Water Swirl Sleeve

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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

Sit down, you lot, and take your elbows off the table, because the stew won't wait for a sad story and neither will I. You want to know about the curl off Gannet Rock? Right.

Keep reading

There was a deckhand on the Maud Sorrel called Tobias Quill, who could not sing and could not swim, but could draw the sea better than any man aboard. He drew it on the galley wall with burnt cork and a paste of flour and tallow, every swell a hook, every crest a little fist of foam. The cook, Mrs Ann Harrow, who had fed three generations of fishermen, told him to keep his waves off her clean wall. He kept drawing them anyway, further and further round the corner, until the whole galley was a sea.

Then came the February gale. We were running for Lerwick with the foresail gone, and a wave came up behind us taller than the mainmast, and it did not break. It curled. Tobias was at the wheel, his knuckles so white on the spokes you could have read by them, and he saw the lip of it turning over like a page. He did the only thing a drawing man knows. He put the bow into the lip rather than away from it, and the ship rode up the inside of that curve as if she were climbing a painted stair.

Mrs Harrow never forgave the walls. She scrubbed at them for years and the flour paste would not come off. Some say the sea took her in the end, others that she simply stopped cooking and let the waves keep her company. I can tell you only that when you stand in the Maud's old galley at the turn of the tide, the ripples on that wall still lean the same way the ship did that night.

Eat your stew.