Black geometric tattoo of a diamond with radiating lines and stacked arrows on the upper back, seen from behind, with the wearer's hair in a bun.

Diamond and arrow tattoo on upper back

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind, with her hair tied up, shows a small black tattoo on the upper back below the nape. The design is a diamond with an inner square and short lines radiating outwards, above a vertical line ending in stacked chevrons. The linework is solid and even, with no shading or colour, and the tattoo sits centrally against a beach and trees in soft daylight.

Geometric Back Diamond Chevron Arrow Line Geometric motif Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cairn had stood on the headland since the Admiralty men came through in 1887, a granite diamond set into the turf with its inner square chiselled deep enough to hold rainwater. Nell Ashdown knelt beside it with the theodolite case open at her knee and counted the stones again. Seven stacked on the spine, the top three smaller, every one of them leaning the way the wind had come in overnight.

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The storm had shifted the lowest stone. She levelled it with a spirit bubble and a flat of slate, saying the bearings aloud as her father had taught her, because a bearing spoken was harder to get wrong. Eleven lines ran out from the diamond like the rays on a child's drawing of the sun, each one a sightline to a spire, a chimney or a light, and she checked them all against the notebook in her coat. The chevrons ran down the spine to the tideline, and the fishermen of Ardvale still read them as plain instruction: go round, the rocks are close.

She was on her last sighting when she noticed the arrows did not stop at the water. Torquil's boat had not come in on the evening tide, and she had told herself a dozen times that a man who knew this coast did not need a cairn to tell him where the rocks were. Yet the lowest chevron pointed inland, up the slope, past the drystone wall and the rowan, to a single house with its back to the sea.

She swung the theodolite round and lined up the crosshairs on that house. The window in the gable was lit, and a figure stood in it, one hand raised against the glass. Nell wrote the time and the bearing in the notebook, closed the case, and lifted her own hand back.