Black and grey fine line arrow tattoo on the inner upper arm, with an ornate hamsa hand motif filled with swirling patterns along its shaft.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arrow with hamsa hand on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small black tattoo on the inner upper arm, showing an arrow running diagonally down the skin. The arrow's head is solid black, and its feathered fletching is drawn in fine outline, with a central hamsa-style hand filled with ornamental swirls and dots. The image is black and grey against a plain pale background, with the sleeve of a white top at the upper edge.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bowyer's widow would not sell Mattias a single shaft until she had drawn the hand on it. He had come up from the harbour with his brother's coins knotted in a handkerchief, wanting a dozen plain arrows for the fog season, and instead she sat him on a stool by the window and dipped a fine brush in ink. The palm went on first, five fingers spread against the grain of the wood, then the open eye at its centre.

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She filled the palm with swirls that never quite closed, curling inward like the wake behind a slow boat, and dotted the hollow of it with a steady hand. "One dot for every night the boats were out," she said, "and one for every night they came back. Count them yourself before you go." He counted eleven and said nothing, because his brother's boat had been out for nine.

Three days later the fog came down thick over the bay. Mattias stood on the breakwater with the bow taut and loosed toward the grey where a voice was calling his brother's name. The arrow went out with a hiss and vanished past the rocks. He heard the wet slap of it striking planking, then a shout, then a line running taut across the water.

Afterwards he took the arrow home and counted the dots again, and found one more than she had told him, set just beside the black head where only a man who had already come home would think to look. He never bought another shaft from her. He hung that one above his door with its point towards the sea.

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