Fine line white ink wave outline tattooed on the top of a bare foot near the ankle, resting on a grey concrete surface.

Wave outline on the top of a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot rests on a grey textured surface, with a dark shoe visible at the top edge of the frame. A pale wave design, drawn as several thin curving lines, sits across the top of the foot near the ankle. The linework is fine and unshaded, and the ink appears white or light against the skin, so the image is largely neutral in tone.

Fine line Other Wave Ocean Swirl Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Jory Penhale went down the shaft every morning for thirty years, and every morning he came up the same grey man, with dust in the creases of his neck. His wife Morwenna said the mine had taken the colour out of him, and the sea had taken the colour out of the village, because the pilchards had gone and the boats sat on the hard in the harbour like sleeping gulls.

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One winter the pumps failed and the adit flooded, and the men were told there would be no shift until spring. Jory walked down to the cove instead, past the engine house with its chimney gone cold, and sat on the rocks where the spray came up white. He watched each wave roll in and fold over, drawing a curl of foam that unspooled slowly across the wet slate like a pen across paper.

He came home and told Morwenna he had seen the sea writing its name on the stones. She laughed at him, then saw his face and did not. The next morning she took a flint and a stick of chalk down to the cove and copied the curl onto the lintel of the lamp room, where the men hung their lamps before they went below.

The pumps were mended in March. When the men came up that spring, they stopped at the lintel and touched the pale lines with their thumbs, the way a man touches a good luck charm, and they went home dry and whole. Jory never said what he had seen on the rocks, but he walked the cliff path every evening after that, and Morwenna noticed that he came home with the colour back in his face.