Blue Japanese-inspired wave tattoo with a handwritten quote on the inner forearm, reading You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.

Blue wave and quote on a forearm

Japanese · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A blue wave with a curling crest and foam sits on the forearm, with a handwritten quote in dark ink running across the arm above and beside it. The wave uses dark outlines and blue shading that gives the water depth, and the script is a fine, slightly uneven hand. The ink is mainly blue and dark navy against the skin, with the photo showing the forearm and a sleeveless top and denim shorts.

Japanese Lettering Forearm Wave Ocean Quote Script Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had kept the causeway log for thirty-one years, and in all that time the sea had never once asked his permission. Each morning I walked the wet stones to the mainland with my lantern and my ledger, writing down the hour the tide let us go and the hour it brought us back. Abbot Dunstan thought the log a penance. I thought it a kind of prayer, the only one that ever got a full answer.

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The winter the storm wall fell, the abbot called us into the chapel and read from the Rule about patience, then from the Book of Jonah, which he always does when he is frightened. The brothers wanted to build higher, to carry more granite across at low water and bury the sea under it. I sat at the back with my ledger open and drew a wave in the margin, a long curl with the foam pulled back like a hand. Beneath it I wrote what my father once told me on the sands at Porthcarrow: you can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.

Brother Silas found the page and laughed until he had to sit down on the flagstones. Then he went down to the shore with a borrowed plank and the face of a man going to his own execution. He fell off fourteen times before the bell for vespers. On the fifteenth he stayed up, arms wide, shouting the psalm into the spray while the foam soaked his habit to the knees.

The abbot watched from the causeway. When Silas came dripping back to the gate, Dunstan said nothing at all. He only took the ledger from my hands, turned to the drawing, and for the first time in my memory he took his hood down and smiled.