Black and grey wine glass tattoo on a forearm, its bowl filled with a curling wave and a whale tail in fine line and dotwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wine glass with wave on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A stemmed wine glass fills the forearm, with a large curling wave and a whale tail rising inside the bowl. The linework is fine and the wave and water are built up with stippled dotwork shading. The design is rendered only in black and grey ink against a pale skin tone, with a dark backdrop and a loose grey top in the background.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Wave Sea Ocean Glass

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third glass cracked on the Tuesday, which Mrs Hale decided was the sea's doing and not the new girl's. Nell swept the shards from the breakfast room floor while the gulls argued over the bins outside, and Mrs Hale stood at the sideboard holding the one good stem left from her mother's set.

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The lodger in number four had paid for three nights in advance and nothing else. He was a glassblower from over the Channel, or said he was, and every evening he sat by the window with a bottle of something red and drank it from a glass he had carried up in his own case, wrapped in a grey jumper. Nell had watched him fill it only halfway. 'You must leave room for the wave,' he told her once, and would say nothing more.

On the last night the wind came off the water hard enough to rattle the sash. Mrs Hale found him in the back parlour with the glass held up to the lamp. Inside the bowl, where there should have been only wine, a curl of dark water was rising, pale at the crest, and a whale's tail lifted out of the trough and sank again each time he turned the stem between his fingers.

'It is a poor trade,' he said, 'to sell a sea that fits in a glass.' He set it on the sideboard and went up to bed without his bottle. In the morning the room was empty, the bill paid in coins, and the glass stood alone on the sill, filled to the rim with clear water that tasted, Nell said, of salt and of rain.