Small black fine line tattoo of a sound wave on the inner wrist, shown with the palm facing up and black nail polish.

Sound wave tattoo on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small horizontal sound wave, drawn as a series of vertical black lines of varying height, sits across the inner wrist. The linework is thin and solid, with no shading and no colour. The plain pale skin and blurred background keep the focus on the centred tattoo.

Fine line Forearm

Find an artist for this

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

Ada Penhallow had asked the tinker for one thing at her wedding, and it was not a ring. Old Amos Tully came up the lane from the mill with his brass horn under one arm and a roll of waxed paper under the other, and he stood at the back of Caddon church while the vicar read the banns and the bell rope creaked overhead.

Keep reading

When Tom Pardoe said yes, the horn took the sound of it. Amos scratched the wax as the word travelled, and afterwards he drew the shape of it on a slate in chalk: a line of ragged spikes, tall where Tom's voice had cracked with fear and low where it had gone soft. Ada watched him do it with her gloves folded in her lap, and she asked him to make it small enough to keep.

Tom went to the herring boats that winter and did not come back in spring. Ada kept the chalk drawing under the lid of her sewing box, and each night she ran a finger along it. She knew the wide peaks by heart, and the flat stretch in the middle, which Amos had said was the breath before the word.

In April she took the slate to the tinker's door and asked him to play the wax again. He did, and the horn gave back the vow, then the scrape of the church door, then a last thin syllable that was not yes at all but her own name, said low and close, as Tom had said it when he thought the horn was switched off. Ada laughed until she had to sit on the step. Amos took up his chalk and drew that one too, a small clean spike at the very end.