Black outline tattoo of a curling wave and a sun with rayed points on the foot, drawn in simple line work with light shading in the wave.

Wave and sun on a foot

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A simple black outline wave curls across the foot on the left, with shaded inner strokes giving it depth, and a sun with pointed rays sits to the right. The linework is even and clean, with greys used only in the wave's shading. The tattoo is set against plain, lightly textured skin, with the sun placed clearly apart from the wave.

Other Wave Sun

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain has been coming in sideways across the fish market since six, and you are the only stall still selling tide tables, pinned under a tarpaulin that drums like a snare. Gulls walk the wet cobbles with the air of landlords. Your uncle Teddy used to say the sea and the sun had fallen out a century ago and had been passing notes through the harbour wall ever since, and that the carved board above the chandler's was the last letter either of them had sent.

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A man in oilskins stops, shakes water off his cap, and asks whether the wave will come in before the sun burns through. You tell him the tables say high water at four and the sky says otherwise. He buys a card anyway and folds it into his breast pocket, and with it a scrap of receipt paper with a curl of ink and a ring of rays sketched on the back. You recognise it at once. It is Teddy's pattern, the one he cut into the boathouse lintel the summer before he stopped speaking to the harbourmaster.

Teddy always drew the wave bending away from the sun as if it were embarrassed to be seen with it, and he never once explained why. You ask the man. He says his wife drew it for him, that she held the sun could only be looked at from the far side of a wave. Then the cloud splits over the breakwater, and for one minute light lays a bright stripe across the cobbles, right up to the leg of your table.

You pack the tables under your arm and follow the stripe down to the water, where the wave and the sun have never touched, and you find you are no longer sure that is a quarrel. The tide turns at four, as printed. The wet stones steam where the light lands, and a gull lifts off with its shadow running ahead of it across the harbour.