Black fine line tattoo of arrows, circles and dotted lines running down the inner forearm, in a geometric style.

Arrows and circles on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of several upward arrows and a downward arrow, crossed by overlapping circles, arcs and a row of dots. The linework is clean, solid black with no shading, and the design is laid out vertically along the forearm. The photo shows only the tattooed arm against a plain pale wall, with a dark wristband at the top edge.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Arrow Circle Dot Line Arc

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the gunwale, you lot, I'm not telling it twice. Old Harriet Pyke kept the lock at Cold Harbour, and she nailed a painted board to the post with arrows on it: three pointing up the cut for boats climbing to the summit, one pointing down for the boats that had given up the climb. Nobody ever read it right. They saw the top arrow and cursed it, because the top arrow always looked like it meant them.

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The circles were the paddles, she said, the iron wheels you turned to let water in and out of the chamber. You turned one, then the next, then the third, and a boat rose like a bucket on a rope. The dots were the rivets on the bottom gate, forty of them, and she counted them every morning with her thumb while the kettle warmed on the stove. Her husband had gone under that gate in the wet March of '47, so she kept counting.

One night a narrowboat came down out of the dark with no lamp lit and a boy at the tiller who could not have been twelve. He asked her which way was up. She jabbed a finger at the downward arrow and laughed at him, and he laughed too, and then she showed him the paddles. He turned them until his arms shook. When the boat finally rose, the boy looked back at the painted board and said it wasn't a warning at all, it was a map of where the water had been.

Harriet told him to clear her lock before the morning came. He did. She left the board exactly as it was, and I have never once seen anyone read the down arrow the way that boy did.