Black and grey circular tattoo of stylised sea waves with hatched linework on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Circular waves on a forearm

Japanese · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A circular design of stylised ocean waves with curling crests and parallel hatched lines fills the frame, shown on the inner forearm. The tattoo uses black ink with fine and bold linework and shading, with the crests left as solid areas against the lined water. The skin is pale and the background is a plain reddish-brown surface, with the tattoo centred in the composition.

Japanese Forearm Wave Sea Circle Water

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Scarrow Cove would take the round copper dish off the wall of the net loft, though it was the only thing my grandfather saved from the Mary Ann. He had hammered the waves into it himself, crest after crest, while the gale ran down the chimney, because he said a man ought to have the sea in a shape he could hold.

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The dish came to me the winter the boats stopped. I hung it above the bench where I mend the herring nets, and I found that once the lamp was lit, the hatched lines caught the light so the water looked still moving. Dorcas Pell, who sells eels from the back of a handcart, came in to ask whether it was for sale. I told her it was not. She said everything in Scarrow was for sale if you waited long enough.

In March a lad from Hollin Bay walked up with a crate of salt-rotted line and a message. The Mary Ann had been found on the sandbar with her hull stove in, and in her locker, wrapped in oilcloth, was a second dish, the twin of mine, its crests filed flat where a thumb had worn them smooth. I sat with the two of them on the bench until the lamp guttered.

I did not sell. I took them both down the next morning and set them side by side on the sill, the crests of one turned hard against the crests of the other, so the two seas met in the middle and neither would give way.