The appeal of surfing to Sharkey was that it was improvisational, a question of balance; of staying on your board on a radical feathering wave, a dance on water, at its best a display of originality, perhaps not a sport at all but a personal style, a way of living your life, a game without rules, incomparable. And some of the greatest rides, on the biggest waves, were never seen by anyone except the surfer. The surfer rode the wave, the wave blobbed softly, and it was over, the epitome of performance art. The surfer paddled to shore, the wave was gone, there was no trace of the ride—something like a fabulous death.

His lover, Olive Randall, knew the truth, because (being new to his life, and English, and a nurse) she’d asked in her forthright way, “So what about it, then, you grinning numpty?”

And she looked for more. Sometimes—the way the earliest humans studied a stranger—she examined his body to read his history and know him better. He slept naked, and often in their first month together she woke beside him and searched for meaning in the ink on his skin. Much of the imagery was obvious, some of it obscure, a great deal was a record of risk; his disfigurements were those of a warrior, battle scars and scabbed wounds and the sutures from wipeouts and jellyfish stings and face-plants.

In the early hours of muted sallow daylight his tattoos were mottled like bruises, but after sunup they were sharpened, as he lay, facing away from her, his back exposed, a great blue wave covering it like a dragon’s mouth, fanglike foam on its jagged crest tipping past the top of his spine, the well-known print of the Japanese wave at Kanagawa that most people recognized, except that in this depiction Sharkey was surfing the great curved face of it. In his tattoo he was crouched on his long board, one arm extended, as he had surfed a forty-five-footer at Waimea or the great wave at Cortes Bank. But Cortes was so far offshore—a submerged island more than a hundred miles in the ocean west of San Diego—only the boatman had seen him, and few people knew that it was one of his triumphs.

Tribal slashes of black, licks and ribbons, covered his upper arms and deltoids, and the syllable Om in complex Tibetan brushstrokes on each declivity of his shoulders. His arms—“full sleeves”—were enclosed by bands of sharks’ teeth, stylized, triangular. A snake circled his left wrist like a bracelet, an ouroboros, its tail in its mouth. On his right arm more sharks’ teeth, a frigate bird on the back of his hand—his power animal, he called it—flattened, his wings outspread, also serving as the image of a compass. Some were faded, some were fresh, all had meaning.