Wave tattoo on the side of a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small black outline of a curling wave sits on the side of a finger, drawn with a single thin line that varies slightly in weight. The skin is warm toned against a plain white background, and the tattoo is the clear focus of the image. A patterned enamel ring is visible on the neighbouring finger.

Fine line Hand Wave Finger Ring

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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

The tide turned at ten past four on the Tuesday, the way the printed tables promised, and Ada Penhallow wrote it down in the signal hut log as she had every afternoon for thirty-one years. Tide, wind, swell, the gulls' opinion of the weather. A wave was never something she recorded. A wave was what the sea did when nobody was looking.

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That afternoon the Pascoe boy came up the slipway with a fistful of chalk and a face like thunder. His father's trawler had been sold to a man from Plymouth without anyone asking the boy, and he wanted to know whether a thing could be made to come back if you drew it hard enough. Ada gave him no answer. She took the chalk instead and drew on the wet stone a single line that rose, bent over at the top and curled back on itself, the way the swell does just before it breaks and forgets what it meant to do.

"That's a wave," he said. "It's only a wave."

"It's the most honest thing on this harbour," she said. "It starts out going somewhere and then can't decide." The water came over the wall by six and took the chalk, and the boy stood watching the place where it had been until his mother called him in for tea.

Next morning Ada found a new curl drawn in pencil on the signal hut doorframe, small enough to miss unless you were looking for it. She left it there. In the log she wrote: Wind south-west, light. Swell easing. One wave, drawn by hand, not yet gone.