Black and white photo of a single-line fine line wave tattoo on the side of a person's ankle and heel.

Fine line wave on the ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph shows a thin, single continuous black line forming a simple wave with a small curl at its crest, sitting on the side of the foot near the heel. The linework is even and delicate with no shading, and the wave is set against smooth skin with soft, diffuse lighting. The composition is close and angled, with the ankle and heel filling most of the frame.

Fine line Ankle Wave Line

Find an artist for this

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

The rain has been coming sideways across the fish market since six, and you have given up trying to keep the tarpaulin dry. Dorrit stands beside you at the cold slab, scaling mackerel with the flat of her knife and not looking up. "Stop drawing on the paper bag," she says. "You'll rub the ink off before the buyers come."

Keep reading

All morning you have been trying to draw the sea the way she sees it from the breakwater: one line, pen never lifted. Every attempt comes out as a knot. Each time the pen leaves the paper to fix a wobble, the wave snaps in two. She takes the bag, turns it over, and makes a single stroke that rises, leans, and folds back on itself at the top, where the curl sits like a held breath. "Don't correct it," she says. "Let the pen go over the crest and come down the other side. The mistake is the bit that makes it look like water."

Through the afternoon the stall empties and the gulls shift along the awning. You keep the bag in your apron pocket, and every time you feel its ridged paper you think about that curl. Near closing a lorry driver pulls up for a crate of crab and asks what the drawing is. Dorrit says, "Weather," and he laughs and pays double.

When the shutters come down you find she has written beneath the drawing in pencil: Tuesday, low tide, still wet. You fold the bag into quarters on the bus home, and it creases exactly along the curl, so the wave is still there when you open it again, a dry line in a soaked town.