Black and grey hatched tattoo of a curling wave inside a circle, with fine script arcing across the top, on a lower leg.

Hatched wave in a circle on a lower leg

Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A curling wave with foamy crests sits inside a circle on the lower leg, with rings of concentric circles at the upper left. Fine hatched and stippled linework builds the shading in the wave and background, giving an engraved look. The design is entirely black and grey, and a line of fine script follows the top edge of the circle.

Calf Wave Sea Cloud Script Circle Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The engraving tools came out on Sunday afternoons, once the chapel bell had stopped and the pumps had gone quiet for the Sabbath. My uncle Tobias kept them in a tin that once held barley sugar, and he let me hold the burin only after I had learned to breathe out slowly before each cut.

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The plate on his bench was the size of a dinner tray, pewter, bought from a Redruth ironmonger on credit. He was drawing the sea from memory because he had never once been allowed to see it from the wheel house. The mine took men down at six and brought them up grey at dusk, and the only sea he knew came through the adit walls as a cold seep. 'Hatch it close,' he said, 'or it won't look wet.'

I spent a week at his elbow while he worked the wave. Rings for the stones at the top left, and crests he curled the way the foam curled off the rocks below Gwennap. When the plate was finished he scratched a line of words round the rim, tiny as ants, and would not tell me what they said until the acid had bitten them.

The morning the plate came out of the bath, the lower level flooded and two men did not come up. Uncle Tobias polished the wave with his sleeve, slow and careful, and handed it to me. The lines held water in their grooves. I tilted it under the window and the sea moved, grey and patient, smoothing the edge of the world the way he had taught me to smooth a bad cut.