Colour Japanese-style sleeve tattoo on an upper arm, with black and grey waves, green leaves and pink flowers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Japanese sleeve with waves and blossoms

Japanese · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A full arm sleeve shows stylised black and grey waves and swirling clouds, with green leaves and a pink five-petal blossom at the lower edge. The shading is smooth and layered, giving the waves depth against the lighter skin. Colour is confined to the leaves and flowers, with the dark wave forms dominating the composition.

Japanese Upper arm Wave Cloud Leaves Flower Blossom Swirl Sleeve

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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

Mind the rope, child, it's not for sitting on. There, that's better. Now don't look at the sea yet. Look at the cloth on my knee and listen, because the sea has been listening to us for longer than either of us has been alive. In the village of Kamiura, where the rocks along the point look like sleeping cattle, the old fishermen said a wave lived under the headland. It was black as ink and curled like a fern, and it rose only when the cherry trees on the hill were in flower.

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A net-maker called Tomi had a wife who sold pickled plums at the market. She had no patience for such talk and said so every morning, loudly, while Tomi was trying to sleep. One April she walked down to the point with a basket of blossom she had picked from the hill path, which was stealing, and she threw the petals onto the water one by one, counting aloud so the wave would know it was being honoured. The cloud over the bay thickened. Grey swirls came off the rocks like hair coming unbraided, and the water went quiet in a way that made the gulls stop calling.

The wave rose green-veined with weed and drifting leaves, and it did not break. It lifted the pink petals with great care, the way a cook lifts a fish from the pan, and set them down again on the sand at her feet. Then it folded itself back into the dark and went home. Tomi swore she had been right all along, that the sea had only wanted someone to ask it properly. His wife never admitted she had been wrong about the plums, and that is the part of the story I was always told to keep to myself.