Black ink tattoo on an arm showing a star-topped crown, a feathered arrow over a dotted line, a row of stylised glyphs and small symbols beneath.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arrow, crown and glyph lettering on an arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black ink tattoo on an arm, with a star-topped crown above a triangular outline and a feathered arrow crossing a row of dots. Below sits a band of stylised, angular glyphs and a smaller eye-like symbol with a simple mark beside it. The ink is solid black with fine outlines and no shading, and the tattoo fills the centre of the frame against a light blue fabric on the left.

Upper arm Crown Star Arrow Dotted line Glyph Symbol Eye Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down by the stove and mind the cat, because this is the true one, the one my grandfather swore on. Nobody in Hallam Cross would say the bowman's name after dark, but he was called Tobias Wren, a wheelwright's son, and he could put an arrow through the weathercock on St Oswald's at two hundred paces without once looking up.

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So when the mayor had a crown made of hammered tin and set it on the flat stone at the top of the fell, he sent for Wren. The terms were plain. Loose a grey goose shaft through the triangle of the old gatepost arch, across the nine dots chalked along the wall, and the crown was his for a year. Fletch it white and the church would have him hanged. Fletch it grey and he might just be a fool.

He shot at dusk, with the lamps lit in the valley below. The arrow flew true, but as it passed beneath the arch the glyphs cut into the gatepost began to shift like beetles under a board, sorting themselves into the names of every man who had ever sold the valley short. Wren read his own name rise up last, and he knew then what the crown was for. It was a lid.

He climbed the fell, lifted the tin crown from the stone, and set it on the ground face down, the star pressed into the turf. "I'll not be king of a thing that needs keeping shut," he said, and walked home in the dark.

In the morning the crown was gone, and a new star hung low over the fell where no star had any business being. The eye on the gatepost had opened, my grandfather said, and it had not yet decided whether to forgive any of us.