Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crossed arrows on an ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

Three arrows cross at their shafts, with arrowheads pointing down and feathered fletching at the tops, drawn in a single clean outline. The design is rendered in a silver metallic finish that reads as light grey and white against the skin. The ankle sits in the foreground with a beaded anklet and a leather sandal, and a sandy beach and sea fill the background.

Ankle Arrow Crossed arrows Feather Metallic

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair packed up its last caravan on Tuesday, but you kept the crossed arrows Mr Okonedo painted on the shooting-gallery board, because he said a shot that misses still has to land somewhere. You are fifteen and sweeping sand from under the coconut shies when the wind comes off the North Sea smelling of diesel and kelp, and he hands you a tin of silver paint and a brush with three hairs left in it.

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He shows you how to draw the thing properly. Three shafts crossed at the middle, arrowheads pointing down like dropped pencils, fletching at the top feathered out in single strokes. "Don't go back over a line," he says. "Once it's down, it's down. The pull is in the first pass." Yours wobbles at the bottom of the board, and he laughs and tells you the crooked ones are the ones people remember.

By August the rides are sold off to a firm in Lowestoft and the gallery is a flatbed on the back of a lorry. You still have the tin. Some evenings you sit on the sea wall at Cromer with the paint and a cheap nib, drawing the same three arrows on the back of your hand, then washing them off in the sea before your mum sees.

The last summer you go back to the empty pitch. The board is gone, and there is only sand and a rusted hook where the sign used to hang. The tide is coming in fast, pale water spreading over the flat. You take the brush and draw the arrows in the wet sand, points down, and the first wave takes the feathers and then the shafts, and you stand there until only the crossing is left.