Black and grey traditional style tattoo of three crossed arrows tied with rope and knots, running across the inside of a 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 coils of rope wrapped around the shafts and tied in knots. The linework is bold and dark, with grey shading on the arrowheads and fletching that gives them depth. The design runs horizontally across the forearm, with the arrow tips and rope ends extending towards the edges of the frame.

Traditional Forearm Arrow Rope Knot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rope had come down off the apple tree in the gale, and by the time I went out with the secateurs it lay in the wet grass like something that had given up. Dad would have coiled it straight away. I didn't. I picked up the arrows instead, three of them, stacked in the potting shed since the summer Gran's roses went over, and carried them to the bench under the window where the light was decent.

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Each shaft had a length of rope wound round it, tied off in a knot Dad called a clove hitch and Gran called a mess. The fletching was turkey feather, faded to the colour of wet slate. Whoever bound them had meant them to cross, one over another in a little lattice, and I spent the best part of an hour trying to work out whether the knots would loosen or hold. I could not get the middle one free. Every time I pulled, the rope drew tighter.

Mrs Abernethy from over the wall came round at four with a cake tin and asked what I was doing with Dad's bows. I said I was sorting them. She looked at the knot for a long moment and said her husband had tied the same one to keep the back gate shut in 1971, and that he had never once managed to undo it, which was why the gate still didn't open.

I left the arrows crossed on the bench. In the morning the rope had been wound back round the apple tree and the knots pulled neat as a row of stitches, and I still don't know which of us did it. Dad had been gone nine years. The arrowheads point towards the gate now, and I have stopped trying to untie them.