Small black fine line tattoo of two crossed arrows on the upper arm, next to a rolled up grey t-shirt sleeve.

Crossed arrows on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of two arrows crossed in an X shape sits on the outer upper arm of a person wearing a loose grey t-shirt with the sleeve rolled up. The arrows are drawn with thin, even black lines, with simple shaft and fletching details. The skin is lit softly against a dark background, and the tattoo is the only colour-contrasting detail in the frame.

Fine line Upper arm Arrow Crossed arrows

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top has gone the colour of weak tea, and Vellacott is still shouting for you to stand straighter against the board. So you do what you have done every evening since the spring: you press your shoulders to the painted wood, count three breaths, and do not look at the wide, dark end of the field where the lights stop.

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There are six people in the seats tonight, two of them asleep. Mrs Okonedo sells the tickets from a biscuit tin and keeps the coins in her apron, and she has stopped pretending the generator will last the week. Vellacott has stopped pretending about most things. He lifts the bow, the one with the cracked limb bound in fishing line, and tells you that tonight they will finish with the crossing, the trick his father performed in Skegness before the war: two arrows loosed together so they meet in the air and drop into the board in an X.

You have heard this story forty times and never seen it land. The first shaft goes past your left ear close enough to lift your hair. The second follows, and for a moment the two of them hang crossed above the crowd, the light from the one working lamp catching their black fletching. Then they bite the wood with a clean double thunk, and somebody at the back actually cheers.

Afterwards, while the others strike the ring, you work the arrows free and turn them over in your hands. Vellacott watches you from the tent flap. 'Keep those,' he says. 'Nobody else is going to want them.' You stand in the mud with the X still printed on the board behind you, and you realise he is right about that too.