Blue and grey Great Wave tattoo in Japanese style on a woman's upper back, near the shoulder blade, with her hair falling over one side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Great Wave tattoo on upper back

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A close view of a woman's upper back showing a tattoo of a large curling wave with white foam crests, based on the Great Wave off Kanagawa design. The linework is dark and defined, with blue and teal ink for the water and grey shading for depth. The tattoo sits centrally near the shoulder blade, with her auburn hair and hands framing the composition.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hall still smells of floor polish and the same watery squash they served in 1998, and Mr Pascoe is reading names off a clipboard as though any of us might answer to them. I find Jo Tregenza by the trestle table, holding a paper cup of tea she has no intention of drinking. She has not changed, except that her laugh now comes out lower, like it has been left out in the weather.

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"Do you remember the print?" she asks. "Above the radiator in geography. The big wave with the little boats crouched under it." We had counted those boats for two years, daring each other to say which one was Hokusai's hand and which was a fisherman's. Nobody ever got the answer right. Jo says she still dreams about that blue, how it went teal where the light caught the curl and grey where the sea was sure of itself.

I tell her about the harbour wall at Porthkennack, the October we dared each other to stand on the top step when the swell came in. She went under. I went in after her, and when we came up the foam was boiling white around us, exactly the crests the print had taught us to be afraid of. Dad took the boat out for three more days looking for her coat. We never found it.

Pascoe reaches the Ts. "Tregenza, Joanna?" She lifts her cup at him, grinning. "Present," she says, and the radiator behind her ticks as it warms, and somewhere in the corner the old laminated wave is still curling at its taped edge.

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