Colour realism tattoo of a stormy sky with lightning, breaking waves and dark fern silhouettes, wrapping around a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stormy seascape on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A wide seascape covers the forearm, with a storm sky of blues and greys streaked with pale lightning and a small dark bird in the clouds. Below, pink-tinged light glows on rolling sea with soft white foam, and black fern or palm silhouettes sit near the wrist. Soft blending and gradual tonal shifts give the piece a painterly, photographic depth, and the image shows the tattoo on a person seated in a car.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shift up, love, and mind the wet on the bench. No, closer, my ears have gone the way of the good herring. Sit where the light falls on your face. This is the summer the sky went bruise-coloured over Skerry Bay, and my brother Tam was out past the Caul in the Mary Ann with two boys who should have been in school.

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The lightning came down the water in jagged lines, like somebody stitching the sea to the sky, and each flash showed the waves standing taller than the chapel roof. Tam had the tiller and the rain was driving sideways into his eyes. Then a dark bird came out of the cloud, low and calling in a way no gull ever calls, and it flew off ahead of the bow, dipping, rising, dipping again.

Tam swore at it. Then he followed it. It led them through the gap in the reef where the water turned from grey to green and went quiet under the hull. The boys swore afterwards it was a shag, though I've never trusted a shag to know a channel. By the time they tied up at the slip the rain had gone and the whole western sky was pink as the inside of a shell.

They say he never would tell which of them had been leading. I think I know. Go on, take the bread from the bag, and don't look at me like that. The fern on the cliff path still drips when the sun goes down, and the bird still sits on the mast in the evenings, waiting for someone to thank.

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