Small black geometric arrow and diamond tattoo centred on a woman's upper back, with a silver body chain draped across it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric arrow tattoo down the spine

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical column of stacked diamonds and arrow-like shapes runs down the centre of the back, drawn in black linework with some solid filled sections. The ink is black only, shown against smooth skin. The close crop shows the back with long hair falling over one shoulder, grey bra straps and a silver chain draped across the design.

Geometric Back Arrow Diamond Geometric motif Spine Chain

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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

Your father's hands shake in the mornings now, so the marking falls to you. Every shaft that leaves the yard carries the same column down its length: a diamond, then a barbed arrow, then another diamond, stacked like rungs on a ladder you were told never to climb. He cut the pattern the winter before your mother died, and the traders from the upper city know it by its shape alone. Nobody in the lower town dares copy it.

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Today the wind off the marshes is thick with reed-smoke, and a bundle of ash shafts lies across the bench waiting. You dip the fine bone awl in soot and begin at the nock. Diamond. Barb. Diamond. The lines must run true or the buyers will laugh at you, so you tilt your head the way he taught you and let the light from the doorway fall along the wood.

When the last shaft is marked, you lift the bronze chain he wore on his belt, the one he swore would go into his grave with him, and drape it over the bench to keep the sun off the fletching glue. Your brother is down at the river with the nets. He will ask why you have wasted the whole morning on forty arrows.

You hold the first one up and read it from the tip downwards, the way the scribes read tallies. It is not a pattern at all. It is your name, spelled the way he spelled it when you were small and could not yet spell it yourself.