Blue and turquoise wave tattoo inside a black outlined circle, centred on a person's back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue wave in a circle on the back

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A fresh or healing tattoo of a curling wave with white foam crests sits centred on a bare back. The wave is rendered with blue and turquoise shading and fine highlights, enclosed by a bold black circular outline. The plain skin around it leaves the design as the clear focal point.

Japanese Back Wave Sea Circle Water

Find an artist for this

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

The lamp glass cracked on the third shift, and Ada was the one who had to tell Frank Coyle before the cage went down. She stood in the lamp room with the brass tray in her hands, the wicks still smelling of paraffin, and watched the light come through the broken pane in a thin white line. Outside, the gulls were already working the spoil heaps above the harbour wall.

Keep reading

Frank took the glass without a word and turned it over like a coin. He had worked the Hartlepool seam since he was fourteen and knew the sea the way other men knew their wives, by its moods and its unkindness. "Old Mr Lowther has a round pane in his boat window," he said. "Cut from a ship's lamp. He'd not miss it." Ada said nothing. She had seen that boat, a clinker dinghy painted sea-blue, with a ring of black iron round its one bright eye.

That evening she carried the cracked glass down to the harbour and held it against the wall at low tide. Through it the sea looked caught in a closed circle, a curl of green-blue water breaking white at the rim, and for a moment the whole coast fitted inside it: the wheel of the winding gear, the grey terraces, the men coming up the path with their faces black. The swell lifted and fell and never once reached the edge.

Frank came down at dusk with a tin of blue paint and a brush worn to a point. He painted the wave onto the pane in three strokes, then crouched to seat it back into its iron ring. "There," he said. "Now it can see out." When the lamp was lit behind it, the light came through the glass the colour of deep water, and the village on the far side of the harbour seemed, for once, to be looking back.