Four black line drawings of arrows, with stippled dotwork arrowheads and diamond details, shown as tattoo flash without a body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four arrow designs in a row

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

Four horizontal arrow designs are drawn one above another on a white background. The arrowheads and fletching use chevrons, solid fills, diamonds and stippled dotwork shading, while the shafts are plain single lines with small dots and diamonds along them. The drawings are entirely in black ink and grey tones with no colour.

Dotwork Geometric Arrow Arrowhead Diamond Dot Chevron

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lodger who left four arrows under the bed at Mrs Pascoe's was gone before the tide turned on the Tuesday. She had paid for a week and stayed three nights, and the boarding house on the harbour wall at Porthkerris had seen plenty of that. Mrs Pascoe found the arrows wrapped in oilcloth, each a different length, each with its barbs cut into the shaft like the teeth of a comb.

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The first was bound at the tail with chevrons of thread, sharp and close as gulls' wings. The second had a head so solid it looked poured from tar. The third had dots along its shaft, small as spilt peppercorns, and the fourth had diamonds strung along it like beads on a fishing line. Mrs Pascoe kept them in the hall umbrella stand, because nobody came back for things in that town, and every morning she counted them, and every morning there were four.

In October the wind came round to the north-east and the boats stayed in. A boy from the fish merchant's knocked to say a man on the breakwater had been asking after a woman in a grey coat. Mrs Pascoe went down with the fourth arrow in her apron pocket, because it was the lightest. She found the man where the wall ends, staring at the water, and she held the arrow out until he took it.

He turned it over a long while. 'She told me she'd shoot the gulls with these,' he said, 'and they'd never fall.' Mrs Pascoe said the arrows had been left in her house and so they were hers to return, and that was all she would say. The next morning the stand held three, and she counted them twice anyway, out of habit, and found the diamonds still caught the light from the window like something left out to dry.