Black and white flash design of a bearded figure framed by two surfboards, anchors, waves and dotwork bands, with no body placement shown.

Symmetrical surfboard figure flash

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical black line illustration of a bearded figure with closed eyes, held between two surfboards that each show an anchor motif. The figure's arms and the wave shapes around it are filled with stippled dotwork, while bold solid black bands and geometric patterned strips create contrast. The design is printed in black ink on an off-white background, with the composition centred and the top and bottom ends finished with crown-like shapes.

Dotwork Blackwork Anchor Wave Figure Beard Circle Cloud Crown

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Off Skerrin Head, where the rock lay low at the ebb, the keeper's wife had one rule: no boards in the water once the lamp was lit. Her son Tam did not keep it. He carried two planks of driftwood down to the cove, lashed them with tarred rope, and tied an old ship's anchor to the middle of each so they would sit straight in the swell.

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The sea took notice. A grey wave, dotted with spray like salt on bread, rose under him and set him down on the sand with kelp in his hair and his boards turned over. Every evening after that the same wave came, and every evening it knocked him back, until Tam understood it wanted something. Anchors, the keeper said, were for holding things still. Tam knew he meant the sea.

So on the night of the storm, when the lamp failed and the ships stood off in the dark, Tam went out between the two boards and held them crossed before him like oars laid over a chest. The wave rose, cloud-high and stippled with foam, and it held him steady while he struck a flint, lit the lamp by hand, and kept it burning until the grey light came up over the water.

In the morning the wave had gone flat. The keeper found the two anchors on the sand, bright with weed, and a rope of kelp coiled round the lamp-room rail. He hung them over the door. Nobody has ridden the cove since, though the children say the water still sits in the shape of a crown when the tide turns.