Close-up of a small black fine line tattoo of a single curved wave on the inner wrist of a hand with pale nails.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small wave line tattoo on wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small, single-line tattoo of a curved wave or squiggle sits on the inner wrist of a raised hand. The linework is thin and solid black, with no shading. The plain background of a dark textured surface and a denim jacket with a striped top sit behind the hand, and the photo is taken from a close, slightly angled view.

Fine line Forearm Wave Curve 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

The tide came up the Ouse at a quarter past four and I wrote it down, the way my father did, in pencil on the inside cover of the almanac. Mrs Abbott on the lock cottage wanted to know why I bothered with the times when the water went where it liked anyway. I told her the book was for the boats, not the river. She laughed at that and went back indoors with her bread.

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The barge Caroline Ann came through on the Thursday with no paint left on her bow and a boy at the tiller who could not have been more than fourteen. He had a single curl of ink on his wrist, black and sure, like someone had drawn it with one stroke of a reed pen. I asked him what it was. He said it was a wave, that his uncle had done it at the market in Selby for twelve pounds. I said twelve pounds was robbery for a thing so small, and he said it had been the price of a wave, and that was that.

He moored above the sluice and asked if he could sleep in the lee of the shed. I said yes, and in the morning he was gone, the mooring rope coiled neatly on the bollard as if he had been raised by a sailor. On the page for that day I wrote: wind south-west, slack water at ten, one wave, unpaid for. I have never crossed it out.