Small fine line black tattoo of the word escape between two arrows on the inner wrist, with gold bangles worn on the same arm.

Escape with arrows on the wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo reads escape in a thin, handwritten script, with a row of arrowheads pointing outwards on either side of the word. It sits on the inner wrist of a hand held up against a soft, blurred warm background. The linework is delicate and even, with no shading, and the composition is shallow focus with the tattoo at the centre.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Word Arrow Script

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sports hall still smells of floor polish and warm squash, and someone has hung a banner reading Class of '99 with the nine coming loose at one corner. You stand by the trestle table holding a paper plate of sausage rolls you have no intention of eating, because across the room Nicola Haig is telling the story about the minibus again, and you can already hear how it ends.

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Nicola was the one who drew the map. In Year Eleven, during a double period of Geography, she sketched a route on the back of a Greggs bag: the coast road, the ferry to Rosslare, a train nobody had timetabled. Beneath it she wrote one word and drew arrowheads either side of it, all pointing outwards, as if the word itself might set off first. You both promised. Neither of you went. She stayed in Ashton, and you took the job at the cold store in Salford and never got past the first stop on the plan.

Now she crosses the hall with two plastic cups of orange squash and hands you one. "Still got the bag?" she asks. You shake your head. The fire door at the far end has a bar that squeals when pushed, the same squeal it made in 1998, and nobody turns round when you lean your weight on it.

Outside the air is cold and the car park smells of rain. You stand on the step with the cup warming in your palm, and for the first time in twenty-five years you do not feel like you are going back in. Behind you the door sighs shut. Ahead, the road to the bus stop runs under the orange streetlights, and you walk down it without reaching for the crumpled map in your coat pocket, because you already know which way the arrows point.