Black and grey traditional style tattoo of crossed arrows tied with rope knots across a man's forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crossed arrows and rope on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows three arrows crossing diagonally with a coiled rope looped and knotted around their shafts. The linework is bold and dark, with shaded grey fills on the arrowheads and fletching that give the arrows some depth. The design is in black and grey and runs the length of the forearm against a plain skin background, with a checked shirt and grey t-shirt visible behind it.

Traditional Forearm Arrow Arrowhead Rope Knot Fletching Coil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

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You will think I have finally lost my wits, writing to you after nineteen years of silence, but the arrows came back to the shop last week and I could not leave them on the bench. Three of them, Father's, bound in the same tarred cord he used on the lighter, the one I told you was lost off Gull Point. The fletching is still black where he dyed it, the goose feathers gone grey at the tips. The rope was still coiled round the shafts where he had knotted it, a sheet bend, the kind he tied on every mooring in town.

Mr Ashdown brought them in from the Lower Quay. He said a boy found them wedged under the slipway, crossed like a pair of scissors, and asked whether the shop would pay him for his trouble. I gave him pennies and a heel of bread. I am not sure I did right, but the shafts were dry and the cord had not rotted, and nobody leaves good arrows in the tide unless they mean to forget them.

I have hung them over the door now, crossed the way he left them on the bench the morning he sailed. Customers stop and ask about the knot, and I tell them it is a sailor's knot and that a man I once knew could tie it blind. Come home for the autumn fair if you can. The rope still needs a proper end put on, and you always did the finishing better than I did. Love, Hannah