Black line tattoo of a curling wave with spray dots on the inner forearm, in a fine line style with Japanese-inspired detail.

Curling wave on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a single curling wave, with its crest breaking into spray at the top and long parallel lines running down the body of the wave. The linework is fine and black, with stippled dots around the foam, and there is no shading or colour. The wave fills most of the frame against plain pale skin and a textured grey wall.

Fine line Japanese Forearm Wave Ocean Spray Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming sideways off the harbour since prime, and Ada Pell had sold one herring and a pound of cockles to a man who did not want them. She was tipping the melted ice off the slab when the old woman came under the awning, shaking out a shawl the colour of wet slate.

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'The wave's tongue,' said Mother Kell, the way she had said it every Thursday since the big swell. Ada knew it meant the last of the bass with the bent spine, the one her father always set aside for no buyer. She wrapped it in newspaper gone soft as bread and took the coins, which were cold and smelled of brass and the bottom of boats.

'Your man still out past the breakwater?' Ada asked, because it was the kind of question the market allowed. Mother Kell did not answer. She looked up at the iron frame of the awning, where the rain had gathered and was pouring off in long separate threads, each bending over at the lip and falling in a curl of its own. 'The sea keeps its accounts,' she said. 'It only ever pays out in spray.'

A gust came in off the water and the threads lifted, broke, and hung in the air a moment, glittering, before they came down hard across the slab and the fish and Ada's bare wrists. When she wiped her face, the old woman was gone. On the wet stone beside the bass sat a single curved print of water, its crest broken into a fine dust of drops, as if someone had pressed a wave there and walked away.