Fine line black tattoo of an arrow crossing two overlapping circles and small dotted arcs on the inner forearm.

Arrow and circles on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single arrow runs diagonally across the inner forearm, with its shaft passing through two overlapping circles. Small arrowheads and dotted and broken arcs orbit the circles, and the arrow's fletching is shown in simple chevron lines. The linework is thin and black with no shading, set against pale skin and a dark blue blanket.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Arrow Circle Arc Arrowhead Dotted line Chevron

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain came sideways off the moor at the Thursday market in Harrowgate, and Maud Tennant pulled the oilcloth over her stall and counted feathers. Her father had made arrows for the lord's archers for forty years. Now he was dead and the order book was hers, with one name in it she did not like: a stranger in a grey coat who paid in silver and asked for a shaft that would pass through two rings at once.

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'Two rings of what?' she asked him. He only pointed at the sky, where the sun and a pale wet moon hung in the same grey gap. 'Where they cross,' he said. 'The arrow goes through the crossing and comes back round the outside, like a hawk on a warm wind.' Maud laughed, then stopped, because he had taken a bow from under his coat and it was older than the market.

She made the arrow over three nights, with a bone point, an ash shaft and grey goose feathers cut into chevrons so the wind would sing along them. On the fourth morning the stranger came back. He nocked it, drew, and loosed it into the wet air above the stalls. It rose between the two rings that hung over the square, passed through both, and when it began to fall it did not drop. It curled back along the broken arcs, circling the rings like a dog round a well, and came down point first into her open palm.

The stranger paid her in full and smiled. 'Now you know where the circles cross,' he said. 'Your father knew too.' Maud wrapped the arrow in cloth and kept it in her apron, and she never sold it. On market days, when the rain came off the moor, she felt it tug gently at her side, always towards the same place where the two rings met.