Small blue and black wave tattoo in a Japanese style on the centre of a chest, shown above an open zipped dark jacket.

Blue wave on the chest

Japanese · Chest · Colour · Photo

A small wave curls upwards with fine black outlines and foam tips, in the manner of traditional Japanese woodblock waves. The wave is shaded in blues and pale turquoise, with soft blue wash strokes trailing to the right across the skin. It sits centrally on the upper chest, framed by the open edges of a dark zipped jacket.

Japanese Chest Wave Ocean Water

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sea came into the chapel at Porthgwidden every spring tide, and Eli Penhale had long since stopped mopping after it. He kept the lamp instead, and the tin box of tide tables his father had pencilled in the margins, and a cracked jug of blue paint his mother had bought from a travelling Dutchman the summer before the boats stopped coming. The paint was for the door. Nobody had painted the door since.

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On the morning the wave came, he was on the rocks below the slipway with a bucket, collecting the sea-glass the storms left behind, when the swell stood up grey and then turned, all at once, into a curl the colour of a bruised plum. It hung there. Foam spat off the crest in fingers, each one catching the light like something thrown. He counted to nine before it fell, which was the number his father used to count, and then it broke across the cove and went hissing back up the shingle, leaving a line of white on the stones.

When the tide went out he found a single blue shard by the steps, sharp at one edge, rounded at the other, the colour of the water just before it turns. He carried it up to the chapel and set it on the sill beside the jug. Then he took the brush, dipped it, and began on the door, starting with the crest, where the foam would go, because that was always the part that caught the eye first and the part that was hardest to keep.