Black and white photo of a small fine line wave tattoo on a person's upper back, with a curling crest and trailing lines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line wave tattoo on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small wave is tattooed on smooth skin in single fine black linework, with a curling crest and foam lines. The wave trails off into dashed strokes to the left and right, leaving plenty of empty skin around it. The photograph is black and white, with a top strap visible at the left edge and fingers at the lower left.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz,

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The road out past Coyote Wells has no end in it. You can drive for an hour and the white dashes keep coming at you, one after another, thin as pencil strokes, and then they thin out and stop as if the surveyor got bored. I have started counting them to keep my mind off the fuel gauge. Four hundred and twelve since the last petrol station, and the heat lifts off the tarmac ahead so the far end of the lane looks like a sheet of water that never quite arrives.

Mrs Okafor at the garage says that's the mirage, and I should stop chasing it. I told her I wasn't chasing anything. I just wanted to see whether it folded the way the sea does when it's deciding to break. You remember how you used to draw those curls on the back of my school jotters, the little foam bits flicking off the top? I have been drawing them in the dust on the windscreen all week.

Yesterday the water tank split and I had an hour to wait for the part. I knelt on the road and tipped out my last bottle, a slow spill running downhill toward a crack in the verge. It spread, rose into a curl at its edge, and then sank into the grit before I could blink. I sat there until the sun moved the shadow of the truck off my knees.

I'm told the sea is four days west. I think I'll keep driving toward the shimmer for one more day, just to see whether it ever stops running ahead of me.

Love, Nell

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