Colour Japanese-style wave tattoo in shades of blue with white foam on the inner forearm.

Blue wave on a forearm

Japanese · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large wave curls to the left, with its crest broken into white foam and spray. The linework is dark and fairly bold, with soft blue shading that moves from deep navy to pale blue. The wave tapers into a thin, streaked tail that runs across the forearm, and a few small dots of spray sit near the crest on bare skin.

Japanese Forearm Wave Ocean Water Spray

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The glass had been falling since the Bristol Channel, and by the second dog watch the mate had stopped pretending it was only swell. You had the wheel on the Marjorie Quayle, a rust-streaked grain carrier bound for Vancouver with nothing in her hold but ballast and a cook who swore at the potatoes. Mr Pryce came up the ladder with his oilskin half on, looked out past the bow, and went quiet in the way men do when the sea has finally made up its mind.

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It came out of the grey on the starboard beam, taller than the wheelhouse, its back the colour of slate and its lip curling over as slowly as a page turned by a patient hand. Spray tore off the crest in ragged flags and hung in the wind, and for a moment you could see the light coming through it. Pryce shouted for hard over. Your hands were already moving, because you had decided the moment you saw the foam.

She rose to it with a shudder that rattled every rivet from stem to stern. Green water boarded the foredeck and sluiced aft past the hatches, and a fine cold drizzle found your face through the glass, a dozen small stings like a brush flicked over canvas. Then the sea went long and smooth beneath you, the tail of the wave streaming astern in white threads, and the Quayle came up onto her keel as though nothing had happened.

Morning brought a blue sky and a flat calm that made everyone a little ashamed of their fear. Pryce did not mention the wave at breakfast. In the log, under weather, you wrote one word in your neatest hand: Held. Then you sat on the hatch cover with salt drying in the creases of your sleeve, watching a single curl of foam slide off the rail and vanish, and you thought how the sea never bothers to say how close it came.