Small black fine line tattoo of two crossed arrows with tiny dots on an ankle, with a beaded bracelet, resting on sand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crossed arrows tattoo on an ankle in sand

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of two arrows crossed in an X shape sits on the ankle, with a few tiny dots or marks scattered around the arrowheads and feathers. The linework is thin and black with no shading, and the skin tones are warm against pale sand. The leg rests diagonally across the frame, with a beaded bracelet on the ankle and soft, out of focus light in the background.

Fine line Ankle Arrow Crossed arrows Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the tide has taken the second marker again, so Mr Ashdown and I have been reduced to sighting across the bay with two sticks and a great deal of swearing. You would laugh. He insists on crossing the arrows the way he crosses bearings on the chart, one line for each station, and when I asked why he didn't just pick one he said a single line is only a guess.

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Last night we walked the sand after the lamp was lit at the Ness, counting. He marks every star he can name with a small dot in his field book, little pinpricks gathered round the crossing, and by the third hour he had thirty-one. I held the lantern while he read them out over the water: Vega, Deneb, and the faint one he calls the Widow because it never rises quite where it should.

This morning the sea had come right up to the stakes and carried the paper off with it, the sketch of the bay run to nothing. But the two arrows were still pressed into the wet sand where he'd set his heel, pointing out toward the Ness. They were so faint I nearly walked over them. He says that is how a bearing ought to be kept, something the tide can take and the stars can give back.

I have started keeping my own dots in the back of my notebook. I haven't told him yet which of us is the arrow.