Black ink blackwork tattoo of a sun with rays, clouds and a curling wave inside a circle, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunburst and waves on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A circular design shows a sun with radiating lines, stippled clouds across the top, and a large curling wave with parallel contour lines at the bottom right. The work is in solid black ink with bold linework and dotted shading on the clouds and water, set against plain pale skin and a white brick wall.

Blackwork Dotwork Forearm Sun Cloud Wave Sea Ray Circle

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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

Nobody at the Hollins Road reunion remembered Mr Pardoe's rule about the rays, so I had to explain it twice to Gemma Ruck, who wanted to know whether I still lived by the harbour. I said I did, in a flat above the chippy, and that the sea came up the steps every spring tide to test the door.

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The school had been a hall of green lino and a bell that rang flat. In the art room, Pardoe made us draw one thing from memory every Friday. Most of us drew horses. I drew the bay at Carrick the morning after my father's boat went out in a squall and came back at noon with the sail torn and the men aboard. I drew the sun rising behind cloud, rays fanned out like fingers, and a wave curling over itself at the edge of the page as if it had been told to stop and had not listened.

Pardoe pinned it to the board and said, 'This is the first honest picture you've done.' Then he took a pen and drew three lines under the wave, pressing hard, and said that was how you showed water moving: by making it repeat. I still draw those lines when I can't think what else to put.

Pardoe died in March. His widow posted me the drawing, dog-eared, with a note saying he had kept it on the staff room wall for thirty years. I told Gemma this over a warm lager. She laughed and said the lines were the only part of his lessons she remembered. I said that was the lesson, then, and went to find my coat before the tide came in.