Colour tattoo of a circle with a blue wave and red swirl on the left and bicycle wheel spokes on the right, inside a scalloped outline, on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Waves and bicycle wheel in a circle

Mixed · Photo

A circular tattoo divided into two halves: a blue wave pattern on the upper left and a red swirling shape below it, with a white section between them. The right half shows a bicycle wheel drawn in black linework with thin spokes radiating from the hub. A scalloped black-grey border surrounds the circle, and the image is a close, straight-on photograph of the tattoo on skin.

Wave Circle Yin yang Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At Scarrow Halt the sea came up to the platform edge on high tides, and the porter's daughter, Nell, had learned to read the water before she read the timetable. Her father's bicycle leaned against the signal box every morning, its back wheel spoked like a fan, and every morning it had moved a little further from where she had left it.

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The old women in the fishing cottages said the wheel had belonged to a boy who rode it into the tide the winter the line flooded. They said the sea wanted a turning thing in exchange for the children it had kept. Nell did not believe them until the night the nine-forty stopped short of the bridge and the lamps went out one by one along the cutting.

She went down the shingle with a lamp in one hand and a length of wire in the other. The waves were blue in the lamplight and then pale where the foam broke over them. She spoke to the water the way her father spoke to the points, plainly, asking for nothing she could not give back. The sea took the wire and gave her back the wheel's bent rim, and the lamps came on along the cutting one after another.

In the morning the bicycle stood where she had left it, its wheel turning slowly in the wind off the sea, and nobody in the village mentioned the boy again. Nell still rides it out to the points each day, and she keeps her lamp lit until the last train has passed the bridge.