Realistic blue water splash tattoo wrapping around the inner wrist, shown from three angles against a grey background.

Blue water splash on a wrist

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Three photographs show the same tattoo of a splashing wave of water wrapping around the inner wrist and lower forearm. The linework is soft and the shading builds pale to deep blue, with small droplets scattered around the crest of the splash. The blue ink is set against a plain grey backdrop, and the three views show the tattoo from the front, side and back of the arm.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sea took Tomas Reyne's brother in the spring, the year the Gannet came home without him, and after that nobody on Harrow Skerry would let a boy go out past the bar without a rope round his waist. Tomas was twelve and thought the rope was for babies. He went anyway, one grey morning in May, rowing his father's coble past the reef where the tide turned like a dog on a chain.

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The water rose under the boat with no wind to raise it. It came up in a crown, pale at the top where the light caught it, and the crest broke into a hundred small bright drops that hung in the air a moment before they fell. Tomas saw his brother's face in the spray, or thought he did. Then the wave folded over the gunwale, took the oar from his hand, and wrapped itself round his wrist, cold as a fishhook, and pulled.

He did not drown. The old women on the island say the sea only wanted a promise, and Tomas, shaking on the shingle an hour later with his wrist bruised blue, promised to give back what the sea had lent him. What he did not know was that the sea would hold him to it. Each summer after, a thin line of water crept up the cove and laid itself across the stones at his feet, and he had to wade out to the knee, feel the cold close round his ankle, and let it go.

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