Blue Japanese-style wave sleeve tattoo covering the shoulder and upper arm, with white foam crests and shaded blue water.

Blue waves sleeve on shoulder and upper arm

Japanese · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A full sleeve of stylised waves covers the shoulder and upper arm, with curling crests outlined in bold dark lines. The water is built up with layered blues, lighter highlights and white foam, giving a sense of depth and movement. Colour ink dominates the composition, which is cropped at the shoulder and extends down towards the elbow.

Japanese Shoulder Upper arm Wave Water Sea Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself by the grate, because this is a long one and the tea's gone stewed twice over. Harbour View stood at the top of Gull Lane in Porthceg, eleven rooms and a sign with half its letters gone, and in the winter of 1912 the only lodger who mattered was Arthur Keel, who went down to the slipway every morning before the light.

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He worked the coasting steamers out of Falmouth, and he came back with his right sleeve rolled to the shoulder. Under the cloth were waves, blue as the inside of a mussel shell, with white crests curled over as if they meant to break across the kitchen table. A man in Plymouth had done them with a tray of pots and a bamboo handle, the way the Japanese deckhands did it, and Arthur would not say a word about the pain. "They move," Mrs Penhale told him once. "That's the idea," he said, and went up to bed.

In February the Maid of Lantern went out on a backing wind and didn't come in. Arthur stayed at the slipway until the lamps were lit, then climbed the lane and sat in the kitchen with the sleeve pushed up and his hand flat on the scrubbed wood. He didn't weep. He only asked her to leave the back door on the latch.

So she did, every night after. Each morning she unlatched it and looked down the lane, and each morning the tide came up to the bottom step and turned back, leaving a line of foam on the flagstones shaped exactly like the crest on his arm. It stayed there until the spring tides took the slipway, and Arthur never once came down to see it.