Black ink tattoo of an arrow made of angular script-like symbols running from the top of the shoulder down the upper arm.

Arrow of script symbols across a shoulder

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A single line of angular, script-like symbols forms an arrow that runs diagonally from the top of the shoulder down the upper arm, ending in a solid arrowhead pointing downward. The linework is crisp, solid black ink with no visible shading. The image is a close crop showing the shoulder and upper arm of a person in a sleeveless top against a dark, blurred background.

Shoulder Upper arm Arrow Script Symbol Glyph

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Coldharbour House only went down, and everyone on the eleventh floor knew it. Mrs Ifeoma Carrow kept the brass key to the lower door on a bootlace round her neck, and when the council sent a man to take it off her, she gave him a cup of tea and told him the arrow had to point somewhere.

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Her grandmother had carved the marks into the stairwell wall before the blocks went up, a line of angled signs running from the roof hatch down to the bins. Each sign named something a family could put down: a debt, a quarrel, a name nobody used any more. You walked the line from top to bottom, handing each one to the dark at the foot of the stairs, and the arrowhead at the end took the last of it.

In the winter the Adeyemi boy came to her door with his mother's ring pressed in his fist and said he had to put it down before his dad came home. Mrs Carrow looked at his hand for a long time. "Not that one," she said. "That one you keep." She gave him the key and watched him go down in the lift with his chin up, the way children do when they think nobody can see them being brave.

He came back up the stairs an hour later with the ring still in his pocket and his knuckles grazed from the wall. He had walked the whole line, he said, and the arrow had only pointed at the bins. Mrs Carrow nodded and took the key back. She had never needed the lift to tell her where the bottom was.