Fine line black arrow tattoo on the neck behind an ear, with a dangling gold earring visible below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line arrow tattoo behind the ear

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of a small black arrow running diagonally across the skin behind the ear, with the shaft and feathered fletching clearly drawn. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the tattoo is set against a soft, slightly blurred background of hair and skin. A gold earring with an ornate lace-like pattern hangs in the lower corner of the frame.

Fine line Neck Arrow Ear Earring Hair

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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

Dear Ruth, the wind has backed round to the south-west since Tuesday and Pell has not stopped swearing at the weathervane on the boathouse roof. It is a brass arrow, nothing grand, and it swings on its spindle the way a wren's tail does when it is thinking. The fletching has worn to a rough feather, and the shaft is bent where a gull landed on it in March.

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Yesterday the Maudlin Rose came in close under the headland without a light showing, and I climbed the tower with the glass in my coat. Her skipper was a girl of nineteen called Idris Fenn, who had her father's old chart rolled under one arm and a pencil line drawn across the sea at the same angle as that arrow. She wanted to know whether the bearing was true. I told her the arrow had been pointing into the bay since before either of us was born, and that the bay had moved while the arrow had not.

I took her up the stair and showed her the lens, the brass gone green at the seams, and the old keeper's tally scratched into the sill. She laughed at the tally. Then she wrote a line in her own book, quick and certain, and I watched her face settle when she understood that the true bearing was the one the wind had been pushing all along.

She sailed on the evening tide with the chart folded small. I have kept the pencil line she left on the stone step, faint now, pointing out past the rocks. Come at Michaelmas and I will show you where it goes. Your loving sister, Agnes.