Close photo of a faint brown dotwork tattoo of wavy lines on the inner wrist and forearm, held by another person's hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotted wave lines on a wrist

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a set of wavy lines and short rows of dots running across the inner wrist and lower forearm. The dots are fine and evenly spaced, and they build the lines in a soft, stippled style. The ink is a muted brown-grey and appears faded, set against pale skin with another person's hand holding the arm at the lower left.

Dotwork Forearm Wavy line Dot Wave

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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

Ruth Calloway had counted the swell for eleven winters from the gallery of Farne Point light, and when the fog came down thick enough to hide the rocks she stopped trusting her eyes and kept a pen instead. Each wave she logged in the book as a row of dots, one dot for every second between crests, the spacing bending with the wind. Her husband Tom called it foolish. He said the sea did not need recording. She kept at it anyway, in ink that faded to brown on the damp pages.

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The autumn Tom took the coble out to check the creel line and did not come back before dark, Ruth sat up in the lamp room with the book open on her knee. The beam swept the fog in slow strokes. She drew wavy lines down the margin, one under another, and beneath each a short row of dots, the way she always had, until the page looked like the sea had been folded into a letter. Her hand did not shake. It was the only part of her that did not.

At first light the boat came in over flat grey water with Tom at the tiller, cold and swearing at a snapped rudder. Ruth met him on the slipway with the logbook under her arm. He opened it, found the wet ink of her night, and read the dotted rows aloud as if they were a timetable. "That's the bar at half eleven," he said. "That's when I'd have been on it." He looked up at the tower, then at her, and said nothing more about foolishness.