Fine line black tattoo of a wave inside a circle on the inner forearm of a pale-skinned arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small wave in a circle on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small circular tattoo shows a curling wave with crest and foam, drawn in finely detailed black linework with stippled and hatched shading. The circle frames the wave on the inner forearm, set against plain pale skin and a white wall, with black fabric at the left edge. The ink is black and grey only, and the design is shown in a close, straight-on view.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Wave Circle Sea Ocean

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pass me the lamp, Ada, and mind the wick. It has been smoking since Tuesday and I will not have it in the window when the boats come round the point. Sit where I can see you. There, that's the stool your grandfather sat on the winter he lost the Mary Ellen.

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Nobody in Gullet Cove will tell you the round window in the chapel came off a ship. They say the glazier made it. But I was on the shingle the night the gale drove the Consolation onto the Teeth, and I watched the sea tear her brass porthole clean out of its frame and roll it up the stones like a coin someone had flicked. It came to rest face up in the weed. The sea had worked a wave into the glass from the inside, a curl of water with its lip just about to fall, and the frost had got into the hatching so the whole thing looked alive.

Your great-aunt Morwenna wanted it for the lamp room. I wanted it for the chapel, so that every man who went out would have a round of sea to look at before the dark came down. We argued three nights. In the end she won, and I sat under that window every Sunday for forty years and never once saw the wave break. It held its breath the way a good storyteller does.

On the morning the last of the Consolation's crew walked up the lane, the dew had settled on the glass and run into the crest, and the sun came through it gold. Morwenna swore it was a sign. I said it was only the sun, and she laughed and said that was the same thing in Gullet Cove. Now give me the lamp, child, and watch the point. I can hear the oars.