Fine line black tattoo of angular letterforms and chevron shapes on the inner upper arm.

Angular letterforms on the upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small black tattoo of angular letterforms and a chevron shape, set on a muscular arm against a pale background. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the ink is solid black on light skin. The design sits centred in the frame with plenty of skin visible around it.

Fine line Lettering Upper arm Letter Chevron Text

Find an artist for this

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

Nobody in Ashby Fold could agree who had first cut the angled letters into the beech at the wood's edge. Old Marjorie said it was the charcoal burners, who marked their stacks so the dead could find their way home. Her husband said it was the bailiff's son, who could not spell his own name and had copied the shapes off a tinker's cloth.

Keep reading

The chevron was the part that worried people. It pointed the way the path bent, though the path had shifted twice since the mark went up, and every spring the sap rose around the carved strokes until they looked like something swallowing itself. Children were told to walk with the point at their backs.

Tobias Fenn went looking for the tinker's road in the autumn of the hard frost, with a heel of bread, a lantern and a dog that would not follow him past the third stile. He found the road easily. He found the camp too, a cold ring of stones, and on a flat grey rock a scrap of linen with the same angled letters stitched in red thread, and beneath them a line in a careful hand: keep the point behind you and you will come home by the church bell.

He kept it behind him. The bell was ringing when he reached the stile, and the village was wide awake, and Marjorie stood at her door with a candle, asking who had cut a fresh mark into the beech that morning, and why it said what it said in a tongue nobody living could read.