Close-up of a small, delicate black fine line wave tattoo on the side of a tanned torso, near the ribs.

Fine line wave on the side ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up photograph of a small single-line wave tattoo in black ink on the side of a tanned torso. The thin, even linework curls into a crest with a tapered tail that sits on the skin beside the ribs. The soft, warm lighting and shallow focus keep the background muted and centre attention on the tattoo.

Fine line Ribs Wave Line art Minimal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The glass was dropping by the time Ada Pengelly came up the cliff path with the boy in tow, and the sea below the Gannet Rock had gone the colour of wet slate. I put the kettle on the range without asking why they had come. She had the look of someone who had walked a long way to say something short, and she kept her coat buttoned as if she might need to leave quickly.

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The boy, Tobias, was eight and had spent the week drawing on the backs of my tide tables. Every sheet carried the same thing: one stroke of pencil that rose, curled over at its crest and tapered away to nothing. 'That's the one that took Grandad's boat,' he said, not sadly, but the way a man reads out a bill he has already decided not to pay. 'Nan says it wasn't that one, though. She says it was the one before.'

I did not tell him that I had seen that wave too. Eleven years back, in a flat calm with not a breath off the land, I had watched a single swell lift out of the grey water a quarter mile west, stand up to the height of the rock and fold itself neatly back down, the way a sheet gets folded. I wrote it in the log at 0412, one line, and when the inspector asked about the entry I said it was a trick of the light. Ada's husband had been out that morning, alone, with a ketch and a bad engine.

I tore a clean sheet from the tide tables and gave the boy my pencil. He drew the wave slowly, his tongue at the corner of his mouth, and when he reached the tail he lifted the lead before it touched the paper's edge. 'It stops,' he said, surprised, as though he had expected it to finish the job. 'It stops just short.' Outside, the sea drew back from the rocks and did not come forward again for a long while.