Fine line black tattoo of two crossed arrows with small dots around them, on the inside of an ankle beside a white and green sneaker.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crossed arrows on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of two arrows crossed in an X shape, each with a pointed arrowhead and a fletched tail, sits on the side of an ankle. The linework is thin and even in solid black ink, with a few tiny dots scattered around the design. The ankle fills the centre of the frame, with a white and green sneaker and grey denim trousers at the edges.

Fine line Ankle Arrow Crossed arrows Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chronometer stopped somewhere south of the Azores, and by the third night you had only a pencil, a pair of brass dividers and the sky. Hollis, the bosun, kept asking whether you were sure of the position, and you kept telling him the stars did not lie, only the men who read them.

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You carried the old sextant down to the chart table beside the tea-stained log. Hollis had two lengths of ash from a broken boat hook, and you lashed them at the middle so they crossed in an X, the way the older hands used to mark a fix on a slate. Each tip was pointed with a sail nail and tailed with waxed cord. He called it nonsense, then held the crossing up to the skylight and swore the Plough sat exactly where the cross said it should.

For two days after that you worked from the cross and the scatter of stars you could see through the glass. Every dusk you pricked a small dot into the chart paper with the dividers, one for each sighting, until the page looked like a fallen handful of seed. Some of the dots wandered, and you let them. The sea was never going to be neat.

On the morning the Lizard light came up grey on the port bow, you laid the dividers down and drew one clean line from the last dot to the harbour mouth. Hollis read it over your shoulder and said nothing, which from him was praise. The pinholes were still there under the pencil when the pilot boat came alongside, a little constellation of places you had got right.