Fine line black tattoo of a vertical arrow with overlapping circles, triangles and dotted lines on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arrow and circles on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical arrow runs down the centre of the forearm, with overlapping circles and an arc behind it. Smaller arrowheads, a triangle and rows of dots are spaced along the lines below. The linework is thin and the ink is solid black with no colour, set against lightly toned skin.

Fine line Geometric Dotwork Forearm Arrow Circle Triangle Dot Line Arc

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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

Mind the pot, you lot, and listen, because I'll not tell it twice. Ossian Pell kept a shop above the chandler's on Sallow Quay, and he made only one thing worth the brass: a bearing arrow fixed on a pivot inside three rings of tin. Point it at a harbour and it swung true, and the rings turned to match the moon.

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A girl came up his stairs one wet November with a sealed letter and a dog with one ear. The letter asked for an arrow that would point at her brother's ship, the Dolores Mary, which had gone out past the bar in March and never come back. Ossian read the paper a long while, then looked at the dog, then at the triangle of brass he kept for the hardest jobs. He said the arrow would point wherever the ship was, but she would have to be patient, because the needle only knew what the sea had let it know.

He worked four nights. Every dot he pricked into the rings was a day she had waited. On the fifth morning the arrow swung and held steady, pointing north-east, past the Dogger line and past anything on the charts. The girl carried it down to the water and watched it for a full tide, and it never once moved off that line.

Now here's the turn, and you'll not like it. Years later a fisherman brought Ossian a rusted ring that had come up in his net, with a brass arrowhead still bolted to it. The bolt was new. Someone had been keeping that arrow true all along, pointing at a shore nobody had charted, and the girl had grown old in the same house while the dog went grey and died. Ossian turned it over in his hands, and for once he said nothing. Now pass me that ladle.