Black and grey fine line tattoo of a curling wave inside a circle on the inner forearm, shown in a black and white photo.

Wave in a circle on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single curling wave with spray dots is enclosed in a circular outline on the forearm. The design uses thin, even black linework with fine hatching on the wave's inner curves and the water's surface. The plain pale skin and soft grey background keep the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Forearm Wave Sea Circle Spray

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sea had been trying to get over the rail since the Horn, and Tobias Quayle had stopped counting the days it failed. He sat on an upturned bucket in the carpenter's shop with a pencil stub behind one ear and a sheet of ship's paper pinned to the bench, drawing the same wave for the fourth time. The first three had come out flat, like pans of milk left too long in the sun.

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Mr Haskett, the bosun, leaned in the doorway with his sea boots dripping. "Captain wants the bell rope mended and a proper picture for the log," he said. "Something to show the Valparaiso men what we came through." Tobias shook his head. A wave was not a thing you could hold still. It rose, curled over its own shoulder, and was gone into the next one. He traced a ring around his drawing with the lid of the flour tin to fence it in. That helped. Inside a ring the water had to behave.

By the second bell of the middle watch he had it: the curl of the breaking crest, the spray thrown off like seed, the troughs hatched close where the light went out of them. He pricked the spray dots with the point of his knife so the ink would take, and he worked by a single lamp until the bell rope was forgotten entirely. When the paper dried he rolled it tight, and his hands, for once, did not shake.

Haskett pinned it above the chart table the next morning. The captain, who had watched real water come over the bulwarks and had no use for pictures, stood a long while in front of it with his coffee going cold. Then he took up the pen and wrote in the log that the ship was dry, and that the carpenter had earned his keep.