Black and grey Japanese-style wave tattoo covering the upper arm and shoulder of a man in a grey vest top.

Japanese wave design on upper arm and shoulder

Japanese · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a man's upper arm and shoulder, with a tattoo of stylised ocean waves with curling crests and foam-like tips. The linework is bold and dark, and the wave bodies are filled with stippled and hatched shading that creates depth and texture. The tattoo is entirely in black and grey ink and wraps across the shoulder and down the arm, against a blurred dark background.

Japanese Dotwork Upper arm Shoulder Wave Ocean Sea Water

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

The wave came in on the third day of the gale, and you were the only one on the slip to see it turn. Everyone else had their backs to the harbour, hauling the last of the creels up the shingle, but you had your eyes on the grey water beyond the skerries, because your father always said the sea shows its hand before it moves. It rose like a shoulder under a coat, dark and slow, and then the crest began to curl, feathering at the top into white hooks that looked almost like fingers.

Keep reading

Mairi Kennan ran the net loft on Holm Ness, and she had been telling you for years that waves are only water with an opinion. Her uncle had brought back a folio of prints from a trading boat, sheets where the sea was drawn as a row of claws, every crest cut so finely the ink seemed to breathe. You copied them onto a spar of ash for the bow of the new yole, working by lamplight all winter, stippling the hollows with a nail until the grain looked like spray.

The wave broke short of the slip, spent itself on the rocks, and left a skin of foam that slid back down the stones and took a single creel with it. Nobody drowned. Mairi came down from the loft wiping her hands and said it had been a polite sea, which was the highest praise the island ever gave the water.

When the yole went into the water in spring, you set the ash prow first and watched the carved crests catch the light and lift as the boat rose. Mairi stood beside you with her arms folded. "Now it has to behave itself," she said, and laughed, and you didn't tell her that you had carved the curls a little too tight on purpose, so the sea would always have to look at them twice.