Neo-traditional tattoo on a forearm showing a red and yellow gradient cloud, grey rain cloud, falling rain and a black and mint wave.

Rain clouds and wave on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo covers the forearm with two gradient clouds shaded from red and orange into yellow, with dark grey outlines and soft shadows. Below them, blue and black rain dashes fall toward a pale outlined geometric shape, and a black and mint green wave with fine dark linework sits at the lower forearm. The composition is bold and graphic, with the colour ink clearly dominant over the grey shading.

Neo-trad Forearm Cloud Rain Wave Storm Geometric shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sky over Skerry Bay had gone the colour of a boiled sweet by the time Tam Lennie leaned out of the wheelhouse with his cigarette cupped and said that was a sky that meant business. Nobody laughed. The clouds sat low and heavy as wet wool, and beneath them the rain had already started, grey dashes slanting across the water toward the pier. We had the last of the herring in the hold and every intention of being home for tea.

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The Ailsa Mae was three boats back in the line, and her skipper, Janet Rennie, was on the radio calling the fleet to stand off the Pinnacle rocks. Her voice came through hard and clipped. I took the wheel while Tam hauled the warps, and I watched the swell stand up off the point the way it does before it means it. It built into a dark wall with a green light caught in its belly, curled over, and fell white along the crest.

We took the first one badly. Tam went to his knees on the deck and came up laughing, which was the only sensible response. The second we met square on the bow, and the boat lifted so high I could see the lighthouse window level with my eyes. Then the rain came flat across the deck and the world shrank to the reach of my own arms.

We came in at dawn with the sky scrubbed clean and pale. Tam found the chart in his oilskin pocket, soaked to pulp, with the harbour leading lights still just legible under the smudge. Janet had drawn the safe channel in pencil the week before, a neat grey triangle of water between the rocks. Tam pressed it flat on the ledge, traced the line over again with his thumb, and wrote the time beside it, as if the sea might need reminding who had come back.