Teal and black Japanese-style wave tattoo on the inner wrist, shown from three angles in a collage with a small grey tattoo on another wrist.

Teal wave tattoo on a wrist

Japanese · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A collage of three photos. The main image shows a curling wave with white foam crests, drawn in teal and dark blue ink with black shading on the inner wrist. Two smaller images show a healing wave tattoo on a forearm and a small grey tattoo on another wrist, and the photos are taken in a studio with wooden flooring.

Japanese Forearm Wave Ocean Water Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Dora,

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The band packed up early on Thursday because the sea came over the rail at the end of the pier and soaked the bandstand, so Mr Hollis has let me have the ballroom to myself until the tide turns. You would laugh. I have been practising the quickstep alone between the pillars while the wind bangs the shutters, and the great painted wave on the far wall keeps watching me do it.

Eli Crouch painted that wave the summer before the war, up a ladder for three weeks with a tin of teal and a tin of ink so dark it looked wet. He told me the trick was never to paint the foam white, only to leave the paper showing through. Every crest is a gap he didn't fill. I asked him why he bothered with the deep blue underneath, and he said the sea is never just one colour. It only looks that way from the shore.

Eli went to Dunkirk with the Territorials in May and did not come back up the ladder. Last night I stood under the wave with a candle and found the bottom curl had lifted from the plaster, a small corner curling like a page turning. I pressed it flat with the heel of my hand and it held. I think I will keep dancing under it until the pier falls in.

Write back soon, and tell Mum I am eating.

Love, Ivy