Fine line black tattoo on a forearm showing an arrow inside a dotted loop, script lettering and an ampersand, ending in an arrow pointing to a small circular motif.

Arrow and script loop on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A fine line tattoo on the inner forearm combines a dotted circular loop with a feathered arrow, script lettering reading keeper of far flung hopes and dreamer of improbable dreams, and a looping ampersand. A dotted arrow leads to a small circle containing a simple swirl motif. The linework is thin and even, rendered in black ink only against pale skin, with the design arranged in a single horizontal line across the arm.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Arrow Script Lettering Ampersand Circle Dotted line Loop Swirl Quote

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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

The stamp on my passport was still wet when the officer slid it back across the counter, and I realised I had been holding my breath since Calais. Her name badge said Marguerite. She asked what I was bringing into the country and I said a tin of my late aunt's biscuits and a map nobody had drawn yet. She did not laugh. She looked at the feathered arrow on my wrist, the one I had drawn on myself with a biro at the back of the coach, and tapped the glass with one fingernail.

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My grandmother kept a shoebox of postcards from places she had never been, sent by people who had lost the thread of their own lives. She used to say the world was full of keepers of far flung hopes, and that they mostly worked in left luggage offices and night buses. I had never known whether she meant it kindly. Marguerite's mouth went soft at one corner, and she wrote something on a slip of card and pushed it under the glass. It said only: the loop is open, go round.

I walked out past the barrier with the card in my fist. Beyond the car park the road bent towards hills I had only ever seen as a pale line on a school atlas, and a dotted path ran up them that no sign had bothered to mark. I followed it until the light went copper and the first lamps came on, and somewhere behind me, I am almost certain, a small circle closed without a sound.