Four black arrows with feathered fletching and dotted arrowheads, in a blackwork and dotwork style, tattooed on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four arrows on an upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Four arrows run diagonally down the skin, each with feathered fletching at the tail and a pointed head. The linework is solid black with stippled dot shading filling parts of the arrowheads and feathers, and small dot accents sit along the shafts. The tattoo is shown in black ink on pale skin against a light fabric background.

Blackwork Dotwork Upper arm Arrow Arrowhead Feather Fletching Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fourth arrow was the one Orla refused to fletch, so I did it at the bench after the lamps had gone low, using the last grey goose wing we had kept alive in the hab-ring. Four arrows for the four relay posts between Hallam Deep and the salt terraces, each carrying a sealed slip of the water ledger. The wireless had been dead nine years, and the wardens still trusted wood more than light.

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I cut the vanes, bound them with sinew, and stippled the heads with a bone awl dipped in soot, dot by dot, because Orla said a sealed point should look like it had been worried over. Along each shaft I set small dots, one for every litre a runner was owed. My hands were steadier than my head, so I kept counting out loud until the numbers stopped sounding like names.

The first three went out at dawn, bow-hung from the gantry rail, and the wind took them down the valley in a rattle of feathers. The fourth I kept back a day longer than I should have, testing its balance on one finger until Orla caught me and asked why I was courting it.

It came back in the spring with its vanes gone and its head chipped, wrapped in a child's blue cloth and tied with a knot I did not know. Inside the slip was a corrected count, written in a hand that was not Orla's and not mine. I checked it against the dots on the shaft, and every one of them was right.