Japanese style Great Wave tattoo in teal and blue with grey shading, placed on the upper back near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Great Wave tattoo on upper back

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a large curling wave in the style of The Great Wave off Kanagawa, with a small snow-capped peak visible beside it. The linework is dark and defined, with the wave crest filled in teal and blue and the surrounding water and background shaded in soft greys. The design sits as a rounded composition on the upper back, with the skin and a strand of hair visible at the edges of the frame.

Japanese Back Wave Ocean Sea Water

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags Ferrin had rowed the ferry across the river that marked the border for thirty winters, and in all that time nobody had asked her to carry anything but people and their goods. So when the man in the grey coat stepped down onto her landing with a rolled canvas under one arm, she told him the fare was two pennies and that he could keep his secrets on his own side of the water.

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He paid her anyway, and he unrolled the canvas on the boards. It was a painting of the sea, a wave standing up taller than any boat, its crest curled over like a cat's paw about to strike, and beside it, small and white, a mountain with snow on its head. "I need it carried to the far bank," he said, "and I need it carried without anyone looking too closely at what is on it."

Mags looked anyway. She had always looked. The wave was painted so the water seemed to move under the lamp, teal in the crest and grey in the troughs, and the mountain was so far away that she could almost feel the cold coming off it. She thought of her brother, who had gone over the hills in a wagon and never written. She thought of the guard at the bridge, who counted sacks and never looked up.

She took the canvas across at dusk with the river running high. Halfway over, the current lifted the boat like a hand, and the painting slid and cracked against her knees, and for one moment the wave seemed to lean over the gunwale and wet her sleeves. When she reached the far bank, the man was gone. In his place was a small wooden box with a note tucked under the string: "For the one who looked."

Inside was a folded map of the hills and a single white stone, cold as the mountain.