Japanese-style Great Wave tattoo in teal and grey ink with a small Mount Fuji, placed on a person's upper back between the shoulder blade and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Great Wave tattoo on upper back

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A woman with shoulder-length auburn hair is photographed from behind, showing a tattoo on her upper back. The design is a curling wave with teal and blue shading and fine black outlines, set against a pale grey circle that suggests the sun, with a small snow-capped mountain at the lower right. The image has a warm tone and is centred on the tattoo, with the hair and a hand framing the composition.

Japanese Back Wave Sun Sea Mountain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shift whistle had already gone when Ruth found the print, tucked between two pilchard tins in the wreck timber the sea had thrown up below Wheal Mary. It was a sheet of thick paper, foxed at the corners, and someone had painted a wave onto it so tall that the boats in its shadow looked like crumbs. She carried it up the cliff path against the wind, the paper cracking like a sail, and her mother said nothing about the mud on her boots.

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Her brother Daniel had been below since six, working the 240 fathom level with a candle stuck to his hat. The engine house chimney was smoking the way it did when the pumps laboured, and every time the sea hit the rocks the whole cliff seemed to hum. Ruth pinned the print to the wall beside the clock. The little mountain in the corner had a white cap, and she traced its slope with her thumb while the kettle sang.

Daniel came up at dusk, grey with dust and coughing, and found her standing in front of the picture. "Where'd you get that?" "The sea," she said. "Same as everything else." He looked at the wave for a long time, then at the sun, a pale disc sitting behind the crest as if it had not yet decided to rise or fall. He told her the men below were arguing about water in the lower workings, and whether the pumps would hold through the spring.

The next morning Ruth took the print down and folded it into her coat. She walked to the cliff edge where the water broke white and tried to hold it up against the real thing, but the wind tore it from her fingers and it went spinning toward the rocks, turning over and over until the blue of it was gone. Daniel laughed and called her a fool. She let him. The sun had been the only part of the picture that stayed still, and she had already learned exactly where it sat.