Back view of a man with a large flowing wave tattoo in black outline and orange and brown fills covering the shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flowing wave tattoo across back and upper arm

Back · Mixed · Photo

A large wave-like swirl covers the shoulder, upper arm and part of the upper back, with heavy black shapes framing the flowing forms. The thin parallel lines inside the swirl are shaded in tan, orange and brown, giving a striped, rippling effect. The design wraps around the shoulder and arm, and the bare skin of the back and a second tattoo on the right side of the frame sit around it against a dark blue-grey background.

Back Shoulder Upper arm Wave Swirl Abstract Stripe Cloud

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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

Listen, and mind the tide-lamps, because the sea on Vesh Reach doesn't forgive a loose tongue. My grandmother said the first wave was not water at all but a long grey sigh that the old moon let out when the last ship went down. It came up the cliffs in ribbons, striped tan and rust where the sun had caught it, and it took the salt-farms and the bell-towers and never once looked back.

Keep reading

There was a girl named Imke Parrow who lived above the drowned market, and she had a loom her father built from the ribs of a freighter. She wove the wave back. Every thread she pulled was a line of foam she had seen from the roof, and every dark knot she tied was a cloud that had blocked the stars. The cloth grew until it wrapped the whole hillside, and the wave, seeing itself caught in the weave, grew slower and curled upon itself like a dog settling in straw.

When the cloth was finished she cut it in two. One half she sent out on the ebb, and the other she folded under her arm and carried to the top of the lighthouse where the sea could see her plainly. The wave took the half that was offered and sank into the deep, and the coast has been quiet since. Some nights you can still see the stripes in the spray, faint and warm, going out the way they came.