Black ink drawing of a curling ocean wave inside an inverted triangle, with fine hatched linework and stippled spray.

Wave curling inside an inverted triangle

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a breaking wave curling over, framed within the lower half of a bold inverted triangle. The wave is built from dense, sweeping hatched lines that thicken towards the curl, with stippled spray at the crest and loose horizontal strokes marking the water below. The drawing is in black ink on white paper, with no colour and a simple, open composition.

Geometric Wave Triangle Ocean Spray

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The landlady at Marrow Bay never allowed guests to bring a board into the front parlour, so Edith kept hers wrapped in old curtains under my bed, and every morning I woke to the smell of wet wax and salt. She was a schoolteacher from Leeds who had come to Cornwall to forget a husband, and she surfed the way some people pray, badly and without apology. I was nineteen and had been sent to clear my head after a bad spring in Bristol. We were the only two who went out before the fishing boats.

Keep reading

The bay had one wave worth the trouble, a left that bent off the rocks at the Stacks and stood up hollow when the swell came from the west. Edith would paddle out to meet it and I would watch from the shingle with a flask of tea gone cold. On the last morning of September the sea went the colour of pewter and the wave came in tall and perfect, curling over itself like a page turning. She dropped in. For three long seconds she was a shape inside the barrel, a dark line against a green throat of water, and I forgot to breathe.

She came out at the end of the bay, dragging her board through the foam, laughing so hard she had to sit down on the sand. I asked her what it felt like inside. She shook the water from her hair and said it felt like being folded into a letter nobody would ever open. Then she pointed at the rocks, where the spray was still hanging in the air like a torn flag, and told me she was going home on Monday to start again. I still have the curtain. It smells of her wax and of that morning, and I have never once been able to fold it neatly.