Hand-drawn black line sketch of two stacked wave motifs inside rectangular outlines, a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two line-drawn waves in rectangular frames

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows two hand-drawn outlines of curling waves, one above the other, each enclosed in a rectangular border. The linework is bold, even and black on a white background, with no shading. The composition is symmetrical and simple, with the two wave shapes repeating the same curl and crest.

Wave Outline Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's worse than it looks, and don't mind Old Pascoe's dog, it has never once bitten anybody who wasn't already owed money. Sit where I can see you, the light's better there. Now, you want the business of the two waves. Everybody in Porthgwidden knows the frames on the boathouse door, one over the other, the black paint gone grey. Dilys Reen painted them the spring her husband took the Morwenna out and didn't bring her back. She painted them the same, curl for curl and crest for crest, because she said one wave would be a sea, and a sea takes everything, but two waves in their boxes could be kept.

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Tom had carved the first one in a scrap of driftwood, and Dilys copied it in ink on the back of a tide table. Nobody can tell you which she drew first. The old men argue about it over their pints. I say the top one, because the top one catches the lamp at ten past six when the boats come in.

Here's the thing they don't tell you on the quay. Look closer. The lower wave curls a hair later than the upper. Just a hair. Dilys left it that way on purpose, so when the pair sat side by side, one was always a little behind, waiting for the other to break first. She said that was how you kept going. Somebody always has to be the one that follows.

When Dilys was eighty she rowed out past the breakwater with the door panel under her arm, and she came back at dusk with it still dry and the frames still true. Her grandson asked her what she'd seen out there. She said she'd seen the sea doing what it always did, and that it was nothing to be frightened of if you kept your curl a hair behind it. Now go on, your tea's going cold, and mind the step on your way out.