Black and grey wave tattoo enclosed in a circle on a forearm, shaded with fine stippled linework.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wave inside a circle on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small circular tattoo of a breaking wave sits on the inside of a forearm, with the curl of the wave shown in dark shading against lighter grey. The surrounding circle is lightly shaded and frames the wave, with a soft, almost speckled texture in the water. The photograph is taken straight on in greyscale, with a blurred background of a person's legs and a grey floor.

Dotwork Realism Forearm Wave Sea Ocean Circle

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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

Mrs Penhallow had let the back attic to the same man every August for eleven years, and every August he came down to breakfast with sand in the cuffs of his jacket and never once said where he had been. I was seventeen the summer I carried his tea up the stairs, and I thought him dull until the Thursday he left the door open.

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The room smelled of linseed and salt. On the sill sat a tin of pencils worn to nubs, and beside it a sheet of cartridge paper pinned flat with four pebbles. He had drawn a circle and nothing else, and inside it he was working a wave, shading the curl so dark it looked like a hole you could fall through, then lifting the light with the tip of a rubber until the spray seemed to hang in the air. He saw me in the glass of the window and did not look embarrassed. "Mind the spot by the hinge," he said. "It's still wet with spit."

Over the next week he showed me how it was done. You do not draw the sea, he said, you draw the place where it makes up its mind to fall. The rest is the circle keeping it from running off the page. I asked him why a circle, and he tapped the paper where the pencil had gone round and round the edge until the graphite shone. "A porthole," he said. "Something you look through when you cannot go out."

On the last morning the sea was flat as a plate. He left his drawing on the bedspread with a note addressed to me, folded twice: keep the pebbles. I kept the pebbles. Years later, when I saw a small grey wave curling inside a ring of ink, I knew at once where I had seen that break before, and that he had got the curl exactly right.