Black and grey tattoo of a breaking wave and a sailing ship, split into rectangular panels, on the upper arm of a person in a dark t-shirt.

Wave and ship on upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a large breaking wave and the sails of a ship, divided into several offset rectangular panels that break up the scene. The linework and shading are soft and grey, with smooth tonal gradients in the sea and sky. The image is a close crop of the upper arm against a pale, blurred background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart arrived at Hallam's yard in six pieces, which was Ada's doing, though nobody in Whitby would admit it afterwards. She had cut the sheet along the lines she had ruled in pencil the night before, offset each square by a finger's width so that no two edges met, and posted the lot in a cocoa tin wrapped in oilcloth. The clerk opened it on the counter and swore.

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The panels were the sea as Ada saw it: a swell in the lower left, a slab of pale sky above, and a long rolling wave she had inked from memory of the Dogger bank in February. The ship sat in the top right corner, its sails drawn so fine that a magnifier was needed. "Where is she, then?" the clerk asked. Ada said the ship was wherever the wave had not yet broken, and that a man who wanted to find it would have to put the pieces back himself.

Hallam did, over three evenings, with a pot of tea going cold at his elbow. He learned that the wave in the middle panel was not one wave but the same wave three times, shifted, and that the gaps between the squares were exactly the width of a rope. Where the edges failed to meet, the water seemed to lift. By the third night the ship had come up out of the paper like something surfacing for air.

He sent word to Ada's address in Scarborough. The reply came back in her small square hand: "You have it now. Keep the tin." He kept it on the shelf above the chart table, and when the wind turned northerly he would sometimes take the lid off and look at the sails, which had never once been where he expected them.

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