Colourful neo-traditional tattoo of a breaking wave with an orange sun inside the curl, set against a sunset sky, on a man's upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful breaking wave and sunset on shoulder

Neo-trad · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A large breaking wave curls from the lower left towards the upper right, with a small orange sun glowing inside the tube and white foam along its lip. The background is a sunset sky in pink, orange, purple and blue, with soft painterly washes. The wave is drawn with bold outlines and detailed bands of teal, yellow and green, and the vivid colour fills most of the piece.

Neo-trad Shoulder Upper arm Wave Sun Sunset Sky Ocean

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maud had been trying to get the sea out of the tomato bed since breakfast. Salt came over the wall on the westerlies and settled on the leaves like frost, and every evening she hosed it off and every morning it was back. Her husband had planted the sea kale at the bottom of the garden the year they moved to Porthmellin, and he used to say it was the only thing in the village that knew its own mind.

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The boy came up the path at four with his board under one arm, wet hair flattened, grinning as if he had swallowed the tide. He said the big set had come through at Pen Rock, the one that peeled for a hundred yards and threw up a lip like a bridal veil. He had been inside it for three seconds, he said, and in those three seconds the sun had been sitting right there in the barrel, a coin of orange light, and the water had gone green and gold all round it like the inside of a bottle.

Maud said she did not believe him, then asked him to tell it again, slower. She put the hose down. She wanted to know how far the sun had been from the lip, and he held his hands apart, and she nodded as though it were a measurement she could use.

That evening she walked past the kale to the wall above the cove and watched the sky go pink, then violet, then the blue of a bruise. Out on the point the swell was building in long grey ridges. She waited until the light ran low and a wave bent over itself and caught a little of the sunset in its throat. Then she went back up to the beds and picked the first ripe tomato, and it was warm as a hand.