Fine line black tattoo of a curling wave on the inner wrist of a raised hand, with the sea and sky behind.

Small wave tattoo on the wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A raised hand with white painted nails and a white bead bracelet is shown against a blue sky and open sea. A small black tattoo of a curling wave sits on the inner wrist. The linework is thin and single-weight with no shading, and the wave sits against the sea behind the hand.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Vosper held my wrist still on the drawing board and told me the sea was not a thing to be shaded. Every chart I had ever seen had hatching along the coast, grey smudges for the cliffs, but the breakers he drew with a single line, a curl that began thin and ended in a hook, like a man turning to look back over his shoulder.

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I learned to hold the steel nib at the angle he liked and to lift it before the ink could pool. I practised forty strokes on scrap paper before he let me touch the Admiralty sheet for the Longships approach. He said a wave on a chart is a warning written small. Too much ink and the sailors would think the rocks were bigger than they were, and they would sheer off into deeper water and lose their nets.

The March the Gwen Lowena went missing, that chart was the only thing anyone wanted to see. Mr Vosper spread it on the office table under the lamp and ran his finger along my breakers, three of them in a row off the Brisons, each drawn in one pull. 'You didn't add a single stroke,' he said. 'Good. The rocks are exactly where you put them.'

The boat came home a week later, her crew cold but whole, having steered by my curls alone when the fog swallowed the lights. Mr Vosper didn't say well done. He took a fresh nib from the tin, pressed it into my palm and went back to his tea. I still have it. When I draw a wave now I think of him, and of how little ink it takes to keep someone off the rocks.

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