Blue wave tattoo with a curling crest and spray, shaded in a painterly style across the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue wave tattoo on a forearm

Japanese · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A single wave curls across the forearm, with its crest breaking into fine spray at the top. The blue ink is layered with soft grey shading and pale highlights to suggest movement and water. The subject fills the frame against a blurred dark brown background.

Japanese Forearm Wave Sea Spray Water

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Carrick House had been out since March, so I met Walter Pell on the stairs most evenings, him going down with a bin bag and me coming up with shopping. He never said hello. He would only nod at my carrier bags and ask whether the chippy on Leeds Road still did battered sausage, as if I was the one who'd know.

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He had been a deckhand on the Hull trawlers before his chest went, and the only thing he kept from those years was a sea chart rolled inside a cardboard tube. On the Thursday he knocked on my door with it under his arm, the paper gone soft as cloth. He unrolled it across my kitchen table and pinned the corners with a teapot, a salt cellar and my phone. Off the Dogger Bank, he said, the swell comes in long and grey, then stands up all at once like a man getting out of a chair. You don't see it coming. You only hear the crest start to break.

He tapped a small biro cross on the chart. That's where the Marjorie went down, in ninety-one. Her skipper was the only one who saw the wave stand up, and he never got the chance to tell anyone what it looked like. Then Walter rolled the chart back into its tube and went down the stairs without his bin bag. He came back for the teapot two days later.

On Sunday the wind came off the estate and I watched the car park from my window. The puddles between the bays were lifting into small grey crests, going white at the edges, and I thought of Walter at the foot of the stairs with one hand on the rail, waiting for something to stand up.