Fine line black arrow tattoo with a dotted shaft and arrowheads at both ends, running diagonally across the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotted arrow on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small black arrow runs diagonally across the side of the torso, with a dotted line forming the shaft and a pointed arrowhead at each end. The linework is thin and crisp, filled with solid black ink and no shading. A hand holding up a white garment and wearing a ring appears at the top of the frame, beside a dark jacket.

Fine line Ribs Arrow Dotted line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Carrow Brothers Travelling Show had dwindled to one tent, two ponies and a lion that no longer roared, and still Marta kept the route book tucked in her apron. Every town they had ever played was pricked into its pages as a dot, and the dots ran from the coast at Hollin Bay up over the moors to the market square at Teesby, where the last paying crowd had come in the spring. She drew the line with a steel nib and a pot of ink that had been her grandmother's.

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Her uncle Ivo said the line was a fool's road. He wanted to sell the ponies and go south to a cousin with a bakery. Marta laid the book open on the hay one night and showed him the arrowheads she had drawn at each end, one pointing forward to the next village and one pointing back to the first, the place where the show had been born. "A road that goes both ways is not lost," she said. "It is only long."

Ivo did not answer. In the morning he hitched the grey pony to the wagon and turned it towards Hollin Bay, and Marta followed with the lion in its cage, counting the dots aloud as the wheels passed over them. Eleven stops. Nine had no crowd. Two had a child who ran beside the wagon until the lane gave out.

At the last dot, on the cliff where the road ends at the sea, she closed the book and found the ink had bled through to the back cover, so that the whole route showed again in reverse, pointing the other way home.