Blue and black tattoo of Hokusai's Great Wave inside a golden ratio spiral grid, on the inner forearm.

Great Wave with golden ratio grid on forearm

Japanese · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A rectangular panel shows a stylised Great Wave curling on the left and breaking into dark dotted spray on the right, with a small snow-capped Mount Fuji beyond the waves. Fine black outlines and blue shading form the wave crests, while the sky area fades into soft grey stippling. The composition is divided by thin lines forming a golden ratio spiral, and the blue ink dominates the design.

Japanese Geometric Dotwork Forearm Wave Spiral Grid Sea Spray Ocean

Find an artist for this

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

Sit where I can see you, because the next bit is the part your mother never believes. Our Alf was the only man on Easington Row who could draw a sea he had never seen. He had a box of pencils from the Co-op and a battered book of pictures from Japan, a wave curling like a claw over a little white mountain. He'd sit on the front step with the book open and a ruler across his knees, measuring.

Keep reading

He said the wave was built on squares. You cut a square off the end of a rectangle, and what was left was another square, smaller again, and if you joined the corners the lines wound round into a spiral, like the coil of rope going down the shaft. He drew it on the lamp-room wall, on the back of his pay slips, on the bottom of the gravy boat. Dad said he'd be down the pit by Christmas if he didn't stop drawing lines that went nowhere.

Then the roof came in at Number Four, and they brought him up with grit in his hair and nothing else in his hands. He never drew the wave again, not properly. But one morning I found his book open on the mantelpiece, and on the last page he'd drawn the spiral with the spray spilling out of the big square in a fine scatter of black dots, like coal dust thrown up into sunlight, and that tiny mountain sitting on the far side, keeping its head dry.

Underneath, in pencil, he'd written: nothing lost, only folded. I never knew whether he meant the spray or the men. Go on, now, get your coats. The kettle's cold and the wind's coming off the sea.