Black fine line tattoo of wavy parallel lines running from the shoulder down the upper arm, shown on a woman in a black bandeau top.

Wavy parallel lines across shoulder and upper arm

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is made of many thin black lines that curve in parallel waves, starting across the top of the shoulder and flowing down the outside of the upper arm. The linework is even and clean, with no shading, so the design relies on line spacing and movement. The photograph is black and white, with the subject's torso in a black bandeau top and the face cropped out except for the lips and chin.

Fine line Geometric Shoulder Upper arm Line Wave Abstract pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third swell always came in long, and Maud logged it before her father could ask. Seven ridges rolled in under the signal station's black window, each a finger's width from the next in the lamplight, bending together where the reef pushed up beneath them. She had been drawing them in pencil on the back of the tide tables for a month, trying to make paper do what the water did.

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The inspector from the harbour board came out on the Tuesday boat with a clipboard and a theory that the reef had shifted. He wanted figures, not drawings. Maud showed him the sheets anyway, stacked on the table and curling at the corners, the lines wavering over one another like boats at anchor in a tight harbour. He tapped one with his pen. "These aren't measurements."

"They're the sea's habit," she said. "Count it in the wrong order and it still comes back to you." He left at noon with the figures she gave him and none of the drawings, which she had already rolled and tied with wool.

That night the sea came in with an eighth swell that none of the sheets had shown. Maud was ready for it, her pencil already moving before the glass rang. She drew it straight across the page in one long stroke, then let the ninth fold in after it, bowing low where the reef would be.