Black and grey fine line tattoo of a vertical arrow with feather fletching and stacked crescent moons and circles on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arrow with crescent moons on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical arrow runs down the arm, with a feather at the top and a fine dotted tip at the bottom. Between them sit crescent moons, circles and a thin central line, drawn with delicate linework and stippled dot shading. The tattoo is in black and grey against a pale skin tone, with a blurred bathroom and striped curtain in the background.

Fine line Dotwork Geometric Forearm Arrow Feather Crescent moon Moon Circle Dot Line Arrowhead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The new moon fell on the feast of Saint Brendan, and I had not slept since Vespers. I sat on the cold step of the north tower with the sighting arrow across my knees. It is a plain ash shaft with a jackdaw feather bound to one end and a sliver of iron at the other, the same arrow Prior Gervase used for forty years to line up the notch in the wall with the place where the moon sets. I inherited it along with the tables and the cough.

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"You'll not see it with your eyes shut," said Brother Tobias from the stair, carrying a lamp that smelled of rendered tallow. He is nineteen and was sent up to learn the count, not to tell jokes. "Prior says the sky is only a ledger if somebody writes it down." I laughed and passed him the arrow. He sighted along it, squinting, and its thin line ran through the notch and down to the roof of the far barn, where a single crescent hung low over the cattle.

I took the arrow back and pricked the date into the margin with a fine nib, dot after dot, the way Gervase taught me, so the page would keep the shape of the sky. Circles for the full moons, a crescent for the thin one, a line down the middle where the year turns. Tobias asked why I bothered with dots when one stroke would do.

"Because the moon never comes back the same," I told him, and blew on the ink. Below us the bell for Lauds began, and the arrow lay across the page, pointing at nothing but the next month.