Fine line black tattoo of two crossed arrows with a crescent moon and dotted geometric circles on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crossed arrows and moon on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of two crossed arrows with a dotted circle at the crossing point, set between a crescent moon in a dotted circle and a second geometric emblem with a wave or mountain pattern. The linework is thin and precise, with stippled dotwork on the circle edges and light shading inside the moon and emblem. The design is in black ink on pale skin, centred on the inner forearm against a dark blurred background.

Fine line Dotwork Geometric Forearm Arrow Crescent moon Circle Geometric shape

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At ten to three the monitors on Ward Seven go quiet in the way that means everyone is asleep except me, so I count the drip stands in the corridor the way my father used to count fence posts on the Dunmore road. Forty-one. Nobody asked me to count them. Nobody asks the night staff for much beyond staying awake.

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Mr Abernethy in bay three has spent sixty years on trawlers, and he is not asleep either. "Is she making or ebbing?" he asks, meaning the tide, though he has no way of knowing it from a window that faces the car park. "Making, Mr Abernethy. Another hour." He grunts and reaches for the clipboard on his blanket. He draws on the back of a blood pressure chart with a hand that shakes only at the wrist: two arrows crossing, a small ring where their shafts meet, a crescent moon, and a little hatched shield with waves inside. "Where they cross is where you stand," he says. "Everything else is just bearings. Any fool can point. You have to know where the lines meet."

At six the moon slides down behind the multistorey and the sky over the bins goes the colour of weak tea. The day shift comes in stamping cold off their boots, and we do the handover at the nurses' station, page by page, bed by bed. I reach bay three last. Mr Abernethy is awake and watching the door as though he has a bearing on it.

I write on the sheet in my tidy night hand: bay three, stable, making. Then I sign underneath, in the small square where the two shifts overlap, and for a moment I feel exactly where I am standing.