Black and grey fine line tattoo of a single curling wave-like line running down the inner forearm, with a knitted jumper sleeve pushed up.

Single line wave on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single continuous black line forms a curl at the top, then tapers down the forearm in a wavering, irregular path. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the photograph is in black and white. The tattoo sits near the centre of the frame against a softly blurred indoor background.

Fine line Forearm Wave Swirl Line

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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

Sit closer, the peat is damp and I'll not shout across the room for the back benches. You'll have heard of the wave that stood up off Hallow Skerry the winter the Marion Ross went down, but you've not heard how it was drawn, and that's the part worth the telling.

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Old Iain Broch was the only man on Sula who could write his name without stopping, and he would not learn to write anything else. When the boats went out he sat on the harbour wall with a stub of pencil and a torn page, and he drew one line and never lifted it. The children laughed at him. Ask what it was and he'd say, that's the sea, and the sea doesn't lift its pen either.

The winter the Marion Ross failed to come round the point, his daughter Catriona walked the shore for three days. On the third morning she found a red fishing float on the sand with a length of tarred line knotted to it, and the knot was one her father tied only for his own hands. She carried it up to the cottage and laid it on the table beside his page. The pencil line had gone over the edge of the paper and down into the grain of the boards, where it ran on like water finding its level.

Catriona kept that table. She didn't sell it when the roof went. When people ask about the drawing scratched into the wood she tells them what her father told the children, that the sea never lifts its pen, and that if you look closely at the curl at the top you'll see the place where he stopped to listen.