Black tribal swirl tattoo with wave-like linework on the hip and upper thigh of a person swimming underwater.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal swirl tattoo on a hip

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A person swims underwater in a dark bikini bottom, showing a black tribal tattoo on the hip and upper thigh. The design combines a large spiral with curling, wave-like scrollwork and fine hatched detail. The solid black ink stands out against tanned skin, with blue water and reef in the background.

Blackwork Other Swirl Spiral Tribal Wave Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The launch came in against the tide at ten past six, so I was already reaching for the stamp when the first sack came over the gunwale. Dilys Penhallow, who ran the harbour office on Skerra, always said the sea never kept to the timetable, and she was right about that as she was about most things. My job was the paperwork: the manifest, the bills of lading, and the flat brass seal with a curl of wave cut into its handle.

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The man at the front of the queue had a passport soaked soft at the corners and a laugh like a cracked bell. He held out his papers and looked past me at the reef, where the water went from green to a blue so dark it looked like ink. "You'll want to see the spiral," he said, meaning nothing by it, I think. I asked what he was carrying. He said a brass sextant, two bottles of cod liver oil and a child's drawing of the lagoon, rolled tight as a cigarette.

I should have held him for the drawing. Instead I unrolled it on the counter and found the same curling wave in pencil on the back, then the same spiral again, drawn the way my grandmother drew the tide, from the outside in. I stamped him through. The seal left a crescent of ink on the page, and the curl of the handle printed itself into the margin as though it had been waiting there.

Next morning the launch was gone and the drawing was pinned above my desk. I still don't know whose child made it, or which side of the reef they came from, but the wave curls the same way every time I look up, going inward and never quite arriving.