Close photograph of a small fine line tattoo of a wave with a black outline and blue shading on the inner forearm, beside striped fabric.

Small blue wave on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A small wave motif sits on the inner forearm, drawn with a thin black outline that curls into a crest. The lower body of the wave is filled with a blue gradient that fades from deeper blue to lighter tones. The plain background of striped fabric and dark material contrasts with the tattoo, which sits near the centre of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Wave Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry had been cancelled twice already, so Maggie Duffy took the long way round the harbour wall with a tin of shortbread under one arm and the tide table folded in her coat pocket. The gulls were still asleep on the bollards. Below her, the water in the basin rose and fell against the granite steps in the slow, patient way it did every morning, as if it had only just remembered it was supposed to move.

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Her brother Tom was waiting at the slipway with a torch he didn't need yet. "Hendry's float broke loose off the point," he said. "Old Mrs Hendry wants it back before the cutter comes in. She says it's the only thing her husband ever made that didn't leak."

Maggie climbed down the weedy steps with her shoes in her hand. The float was wedged between two black rocks, glass gone cloudy at the rim and deep blue at the base, the colour the sea turned off the point at noon when the sun was high and nobody was looking. She turned it over in her palms. Someone had scratched a tiny crest into the glass with a nail, the way her grandmother used to draw a wave at the bottom of every letter she sent from Oban.

When the first light touched the water, the scratched crest caught it and threw a thin line of white across the steps. Maggie held the float a moment longer than she needed to. Then she set it on the top step where Tom could see it, tucked the shortbread beside it, and walked home along the wall without saying a word about the scratch, or about how the sea had kept something of her grandmother's all this time and given it back on a Tuesday.