A sheet of blue line and solid wave designs in a Japanese-influenced style, arranged in rows on a white background.

Sheet of blue wave designs

Japanese · Colour · Flash

The image shows a sheet of many small wave designs drawn in blue, including curling crests, swirling cloud-like forms and layered rolling swells. The linework is bold in some designs and fine in others, with solid blue fills in a few. The waves are arranged in a grid on a plain white background, so each one can be viewed separately.

Japanese Wave Sea Swirl Cloud Water Crest

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sheet arrived in March, rolled in brown paper and smelling of the printer's back room in Hastings. Forty small waves in blue ink on white card. Mr Pellow had ordered them for the new board over the parlour door, and he wanted me to choose, since I would be the one looking up at it every morning for the rest of my days. I spread the card across the kitchen table and let the kettle go cold while I looked.

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Most of them were tidy and told the sea nothing. I liked the ones that curled over themselves like a sleeve turned back at the wrist, and the little swirled clouds that sat on the swell like cream on a pudding. The lodgers came down to breakfast and asked which I'd picked, and I said I hadn't decided. Pellow's girl, nine years old and in charge of the back stairs, stood at my elbow, put a finger on a cloud with three curls and said that one was the sea being polite.

I chose the thin-lined one, a wave lifting high and folding back into a spiral, the way a rope coils on a quay. Pellow said it was too fine to read from the road. I said the road was not who it was for. We argued about it over three teas, and in the end he took the card down to the signwriter in Rye and came back with the lines cut into a brass plate that caught the light whenever the door opened.

The girl stood under it every morning on her way to school, one hand on the frame, counting the curls out loud until the bell. The last time I saw the plate was the week the lodgers left for the season, and she was still counting, though the sea outside had gone flat and grey and there was nothing left in it to match.