Black ink tattoo of a circular sea scene with sunrays, clouds and rolling waves on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun, clouds and waves on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A circular black ink tattoo shows a sun behind clouds, with radiating rays fanning across the top half. Rolling waves with fine parallel contour lines fill the lower half, with dense hatching in the troughs. The design is entirely black and grey on pale skin, centred on the forearm against a white brick wall.

Blackwork Traditional Forearm Sun Cloud Wave Sea

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

You learned the stove first, before the sea taught you anything else. The Ardent Mary rolled so hard on the Dogger that the porridge pan walked itself off the hob, and you caught it with a cloth wrapped round your fist, the way Old Haig had shown you, swearing at him for a fool. Above the range, pinned through one corner of the chart, is the drawing you cut from a tobacco tin label: a sun gone behind a bank of cloud, rays fanning down like spokes, and under it the sea rising in long combed rolls that never quite break.

Keep reading

Nobody aboard had ever seen that sun clear. Week after week the sky sat low and grey as a dishcloth, and you fed twelve men on tinned peaches, salt beef and a loaf you baked every second night. Haig said the picture was daft, the sort of thing you'd find in a child's schoolbook. You said nothing and left it up there anyway, because when you stood at the sink with your hands in cold water you could look up, find the rays, and know which way was up.

On the fourth morning of the blow, with the hatch dogged shut and water sloshing across the deckhead, the cloud split. You saw it through the scuttle, a thin bar of gold laid flat across the swell, and it lit the flour dust hanging in the air so the whole galley glowed like the inside of a loaf. Haig came down the ladder with the lamp in his teeth and stopped dead.

He didn't call the picture daft again. He took the bread knife from your hand, cut two thick slices, and passed one back, still warm, and you ate it standing in the light while the sea went on climbing the glass.