Colour tattoo of a child in a red top reading a red book on a curling wave, with green ferns and a blue line below, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Child reading on a wave with ferns

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A small figure with dark hair and a red top sits reading a red book on a curved, shaded wave. Green fern fronds rise on either side, and a blue wave line runs along the base. The outlines are dark and simple, with soft grey shading on the wave and colour fills on the figure and plants, and the design sits centred on the limb against a blurred background.

Forearm Child Book Fern Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide had already taken the bottom step of the slipway when Nell Carver dragged the red paperback out from under the bench and decided the sea could wait. Her father was still arguing with the outboard. Her brother was throwing stones at gulls. Nobody would miss her for twenty minutes, and the book had reached the chapter where the lighthouse keeper's daughter finally opened the locked room.

Keep reading

She waded out to the shelf where the water folded over itself, slow and green, and sat down on the back of the swell as if someone had left a sofa there for her. It lifted gently. The ferns along the cliff leaned in to see what she was reading. Page after page the wave carried her past the harbour wall, past the rock shaped like a sleeping dog, past an old fisherman who lifted his cap and asked no questions at all.

By the time the keeper's daughter found the key, the wave had brought Nell to the far cove, where the sand was pale and nobody had ever built a house. She looked back the way she had come and saw the slipway very small, her father's arms waving like someone trying to flag down a ship. She turned the page. Her thumb left a damp print on the word home.

She read to the last line, and then she read the last line again. The wave, which had been patient all afternoon, began slowly to turn back toward shore, and Nell decided she would finish the book on the way.