Fine line black dotted arrow tattoo on the side of an upper arm, with a person lifting a striped top beside it.

Dotted arrow tattoo on the upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of a dotted line with an arrowhead at its left end and a chevron at its right end, forming a simple directional mark. The linework is fine and the dots are evenly spaced, with the arrow drawn in solid black ink against pale skin. The photo is cropped close, with a striped top being held up at the edge of the frame and a plain light background.

Fine line Dotwork Upper arm Arrow Dotted line Chevron

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock at Hanwell Bottom had been stuck since March, and Nell Crowther had spent three mornings with a windlass and a bad temper trying to coax the gate open. Her father's narrowboat, the Wren, sat idling in the basin behind her, its chimney puffing grey into the drizzle. He had given her the boat in the autumn with a single instruction written on the back of a tide table: keep her pointed the right way.

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On the fourth morning a stranger came down the towpath with a rucksack and a map folded to a soft square. He was looking for the Grand Union junction and had been walking the wrong side of the water for an hour. Nell told him to wait while she finished the gate, and he did, leaning on the railing and reading the notices about closures as if they were poems. When the paddles finally lifted, the water rushed out in a brown tongue and the boat sank a foot in the chamber.

He helped her line the Wren up without being asked, which she resented and then forgave. Going through, he pointed at the sign on the lock beam, an old arrow painted white on black, and said the canal had only ever pulled one way, towards the next lock, never back. Nell said it was the water doing the pulling. He said perhaps, but someone had to choose which way the boat faced.

At the junction she held the tiller steady and watched him climb onto the bank with his rucksack, pausing once to look back. She did not wave. She simply turned the bow north, the way her father had written on the tide table, and felt the dotted wake of small ripples close behind her, each one fading just before it reached the reeds.