Fine line geometric arrow tattoo made of nested black triangles, running down the inner forearm.

Geometric arrow on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

An arrow built from stacked, nested triangles, with a diamond-shaped head at the top and a long thin shaft ending in a small dot. The linework is fine and even in black ink, with no shading. The forearm is photographed against a plain background with a red chair and a white top visible.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Arrow Triangle Diamond Geometric shape Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been ruling lines on the chart table since the Azores, and the pencil has worn a pale groove into the edge of your parallel rule. The mate says the Halcyon's reckoning is out by a degree, and you do not argue, because he is older and because you have been wrong before. Instead you lay the set square against the chart, walk it across the compass rose, and draw the first triangle with its point aimed at the Cape.

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Every noon you add another. The shapes nest inside each other the way the brass measuring cups in your grandmother's kitchen did, each one smaller than the last, until the bearing becomes a diamond at the top of the page and a single thin line running down to a dot where you believe the ship to be. The dot is a pinprick of ink. The sea has never once been interested in it.

On the ninth night the wind backs and the cloud tears open, and Pell, the boy who carries the slush lamp, shows you Canopus low over the larboard quarter. You unwrap the sextant from its green baize and shoot the star twice, writing both figures on the back of your hand because the slate was washed clean by a wave off the Horn. The numbers agree. In twenty years at sea that has happened to you perhaps four times.

When you finally ink the last stroke, the shaft runs clean off the edge of the paper and you let it go. Landfall arrives first as a rumour of gulls, then as a smell of wet earth and cut peat. Tell Pell to fetch the dividers from the drawer, you say, and when he brings them you close your fist around the brass and find the place where the line ends, and it is only a point, and it is enough.