Traditional style tattoo of two pairs of crossed arrows with red bindings and blue and yellow droplets, placed on a forearm beside other partly visible tattoos.

Crossed arrows with drops on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows two pairs of arrows crossed in a V shape, one pair above the other, with feathered fletching in grey and black and red bands near the shafts. Bold black outlines and flat solid fills define the arrowheads, with blue, yellow and red droplets scattered between them. Partly visible tattoos of an animal head and a dark animal sit at the edges of the frame, with a dotted cloud shape and script on the left.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain starts just as you reach the lock gates at Brentford, and the stern line is already humming with the weight of the barge. Your father is shouting from the tiller, something about the water being high and the gate being stiff, and you have the rope in both hands because nobody else is free to hold it. The coil is slick and cold. Drops run off the fibres and fall into the brown water, and you count them the way Uncle Ray taught you, one for each breath you're allowed to waste.

Keep reading

Ray painted the arrows on the cabin door the summer before he went off to sea. Two pairs, one crossed over the other, the heads black and the feathers grey with red bands near the shafts. He said a crossed pair holds in a flood better than a single shaft, because the river can't pull them apart. He said it while he sharpened a real arrow on the towpath, and he was wrong about most things, but not about that. You remember the sound of his file, and how he laughed when you asked why the arrowheads were so dark.

The gates groan open and the water surges through the chamber. The barge lurches, the rope bites your palms, and for one second you think you'll be dragged in after it. Then you do what Ray showed you: loop, pass under, pull over, tuck the end back through. The knot bites down hard and the barge settles against the fenders like an animal lying down. Your father looks back over the tiller, sees the knot, and nods once. You stand there with rain in your collar and your hands stinging, and you do not let go.

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