Navy engraved-style drawing of a curling wave with foam and a dark speckled circle on a beige background, a flash design with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Curling wave with splatter circle

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A large curling wave is drawn in navy ink with fine engraved hatching along its body and stippled spray at the crest. A dark speckled circle sits to the left of the wave on a pale beige background, with a few stray ink spots near the base. The composition is a single centred motif with no body part shown.

Japanese Dotwork Wave Sea Splatter Circle

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, you're letting the cold in. Not that chair, that's where your grandad used to drop his tea. There. Now listen, because I'm only telling this once before the lift breaks again.

Keep reading

Sixteen floors up in Harbour Court, a woman called Ida Marr kept the sea in a biscuit tin. Every night she lifted the lid and the wave inside curled up, grey and patient, the way it used to off the groyne when she was a girl. The moon was in there too, a black smudge of a moon, because the tin had been dropped on the stairs once and the ink had gone everywhere.

One February the wave got out. It came over the railings of the car park, up the stairwell, and stood at the balcony door with its shoulder raised, waiting for her to say something. She didn't. She just poured it a cup of tea, the way you would for a stranger sheltering in the bus stop.

The wave looked at that cup a long time. Then it sighed, spilled itself back down the stairs in a long white hiss, and left the moon behind on the lino, a dark ring of spray where it had been sitting.

Ida never mopped it up. Said it was the only thing in the block that was honest about where it came from.