Close-up of a small fine-line black wave tattoo with a Hokusai-style curl on the side of a person's ribs, under the arm.

Small wave tattoo on the side ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small outline of a curling wave with spray droplets and a thin, flat trough line extending to the right. The linework is single-weight and dark, with hatched lines inside the curl to suggest the water's texture. The tattoo sits centrally on a pale patch of skin against a dark navy top, with the edge of a hand visible at the right of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide had already claimed the kitchen steps when Dorothy came up the cliff path with the lamp swinging from one hand, shouting that the sea was coming over the curtain wall again. I left the bread in the oven and ran after her, past the broken gatehouse where ivy had grown through the arrow slits.

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Carrick Hollow had been a castle once, before the cliff began to eat it. Now only the chapel stood, along with a hall with no roof and the sea wall my uncle had been paid to mend for forty years. Dorothy said the big wave had a name. She called it the Drowned Clerk, because it came in curled like a man bowing over a ledger, and it always took something back.

We found the water already inside the outer ward, pale and frothing over the flagstones. Dorothy stood at the edge with her lamp raised, watching a single great wave lift against the broken wall, curl over itself and hang there, flinging salt across our faces. I could see every spit of foam in the light. For a breath it looked as if it might hold still forever.

Then it fell, not on us but on the rocks below, and the water drew back across the flagstones like a sheet being pulled off a bed. Dorothy lowered the lamp. "It took the gate," she said, "but it left us the path." Behind us the iron hinge my grandfather had hung still swung in the wind, and the sea went quiet, as though it had only wanted to be seen.

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