Black line-and-shape geometric arrow design with stacked triangles, bars and dots, and the words KEEP MOVING FORWARD beneath it, shown as a flash drawing on a light grey background.

Geometric arrow with Keep Moving Forward text

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A vertical arrow built from simple geometric elements: a hollow and solid triangle at the tip, horizontal bars and dots along the shaft, three stacked solid triangles, and chevron fletching at the base. Thin single-weight lines contrast with solid black shapes, and the design is set centrally on a plain light grey background. The words KEEP MOVING FORWARD sit in small capitals beneath the arrow.

Geometric Arrow Triangle Dot Bar Chevron Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down on that bench, and mind the knot in it, for it has been waiting for a fool since my grandmother's day. You want to hear about Brother Anselm and the sundial on the south wall of Saint Ebba's. Every noon for forty winters he climbed the ladder with his ledger under one arm and his brass square in his teeth, and he wrote down where the shadow fell. The iron arrow that threw that shadow had a little hollow triangle at its tip, and a solid one set inside it, so that the monks used to say the sun was always being guided home.

Keep reading

Then the abbot decided the wall was crooked and sent for masons to take the whole dial down. Anselm stood in the yard with his arms folded and would not let them touch the gnomon. He said the arrow was true, and it was the monks who had wandered. So they left it, and he went up each day to chalk the slate with his small marks: three stacked triangles for the hours of prayer, a bar for every feast, a dot for each day he had walked the bounds of the estate and come back with mud to his knees.

The spring the boy Tobiah came from the fens, he asked why the arrow pointed over the cloister roof, away from the chapel where everyone knelt. Anselm chewed on that for a long while. Then he took the boy up the ladder and showed him the chevrons cut into the base of the iron, where the light first struck it each morning. The old man said the arrow was not pointing at God or at the abbot, only at the day that was coming.

Tobiah left the abbey the year after, and on the last evening Anselm walked him to the gate, the shadow of the arrow lying long across the path ahead of them both. The boy stepped onto it and kept walking, and the old man watched until the dark swallowed him.