Black fine-line tattoo of stacked, undulating wave lines wrapping around the inside of a forearm.

Stacked wave lines on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm tattoo of many closely spaced horizontal lines that rise and dip into peaks and troughs, like a waveform. The thin black linework is uniform, and the lines fade to plain skin at the edges of the band. The design covers the forearm in a band against a pale wall and grey clothing.

Fine line Forearm Line Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Pell found the rolls of paper on the landing every morning, tied with string and smelling of ink, and she never asked Mr Halloran what he measured in the back room of Seaview House. He had taken the room in October, a retired instrument maker with a brass drum wound with clockwork and a pen on an arm that scratched across the paper while the tide worked at the sea wall below. Nobody else in Salthorpe rose early enough to hear it.

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On the first Sunday of March she carried his tea up and found him bent over the sheets with a magnifying glass. "Come and look," he said, and laid a length of paper across the eiderdown. The lines were stacked like the ribs of a shell, each one a fraction behind the last, lifting into hills and dropping into troughs so steep the nib had nearly torn through. "Every swell's different," he said, "and yet it's the same swell, over and over, a few seconds apart. Like something knocking to be let in."

Ada said the sea had always been loud in Salthorpe and that the wind did strange things to the wall. He only nodded and turned the drum by hand, and she saw his fingers were stained blue to the knuckle. She left the tea cooling on the sill and went down to start the breakfasts, but the rhythm of the pen came through the ceiling all morning, steady as a heartbeat under a blanket.

That evening she took the newest sheet off the landing, unrolled it on the kitchen table beside the tide tables, and pinned it to the wall with two drawing pins. By morning the lines had run on across the paper, and at the bottom margin they simply stopped, flat, as if the sea had gone out and not come back. Upstairs, the drum was still turning.