Small blue watercolour-style wave tattoo with black linework curling across the inner wrist, with a soft pink-tinged skin background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue wave on a wrist

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small wave curls to the right across the inner wrist, drawn with a dark outline and a thin curl at its crest. Soft blue washes fill the body of the wave and fade into the skin at its edges, with small splashes of blue above. The colour is concentrated in the blue wash, and the image is taken straight on against a dark background.

Forearm Wave Sea Water Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Before the sea-wall went up at Carrow, the wave that came every ninth morning was the only thing the fishers trusted. Old Thessaly Mond had watched it from her step for forty winters and could tell its temper by the colour of the spray. It was a grey, sulking thing that day, and she knew her grandson would be out on the blue rocks because he had quarrelled with the potter's boy and would not come home till the light went.

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She went down with a basket of bread and a stick. The tide was turning, and the water stood up off the reef like a horse that had decided not to be ridden. Her grandson, Hal, was crouched among the weed with his shirt wet to the ribs, trying to prise a limpet from its stone with a knife he should not have had. The wave saw him before she did. It lifted its crest, curled over, and stopped, hanging in the morning air as if it were thinking.

She said nothing. Her mother had taught her that the sea listens better to silence than to scolding. She set the bread on the rock, sat down, and began to hum the song about the salt-carrier who rowed to the moon. After a long while the curl loosened and the wave laid itself along the sand in a long white sigh, and the boy came up the beach with his knife in his fist and his eyes very wide.

That evening, when the sea had gone back to its own business, Hal found a single curl of foam caught in the tide-line, shaped like a hand half closed. He kept it in a jar until it dried to nothing, and he never once tried to coax a limpet again.