Black and grey wave tattoo with curling crest inside an inverted triangle outline on the inner forearm, in a Japanese-inspired style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wave inside an inverted triangle on a forearm

Japanese · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large curling wave with a foamy crest sits inside an inverted triangle outline, with the base of the triangle pointing down the forearm. The wave is built from crisp black linework and solid black areas for the water, with fine stippled shading and white space left in the foam. The image is a close, straight-on photograph of the healed or fresh tattoo on pale skin against a neutral background.

Japanese Blackwork Geometric Forearm Wave Ocean Triangle Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the wards believed Tom Carne when he said the tide was coming up the back stairs, so he stopped saying it and just mopped. Every night at two o'clock the water came under the fire door on the ground floor, cold and smelling of weed, and every night he pushed it back out with the long squeegee before the night sister could see her shoes wet. The old porters said it had always been so in the Cottage, since the place was a fishermen's almshouse and the sea had wanted its share of the building back.

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He kept a chalk triangle on the wall by the lift, point down, the way his grandfather had marked a bad sea on the harbour board. Inside it he drew a wave with a curl like a hand closing, because that was what the water did at the top of the stairs when it turned. The porters called it the Cutting Wave. Nobody rubbed it out, not even the cleaners, who were frightened of the stairwell and went round it.

In February a girl in bed four asked him why the floor was always damp by the lift. She was nine and had a broken wrist from a fall off a sea wall, and she liked the way he told things plainly. Tom said it was the sea looking for its boots. She laughed, then went quiet and asked whether it would take her if she went down the stairs in her sleep. He told her the sea only took what it had been given, and that she had been given back.

At first light the water drew back under the fire door and left a line of salt on the lino as straight as a ruler. Tom swept it into the bucket. The tide table on the wall said high water at six, which was right, and the chalk wave by the lift had smudged, its crest gone soft, as if someone had leaned on it all night and gone home.