Close-up of a hand and wrist with metallic gold and black temporary arrow, chevron and bracelet-style designs, holding a white phone.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gold and black temporary arrow tattoos on a hand

Geometric · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A woman holds a white phone with one hand, and the back of that hand and the wrist carry metallic gold and black temporary tattoos. The designs include a black arrow with a line and diamond, small gold chevrons across the fingers and back of the hand, and a gold bracelet design with black teardrop gems at the wrist. The image is shot at close range against a plain grey background, with the metallic finishes catching the light.

Geometric Fine line Hand Forearm Arrow Chevron Bracelet Gemstone Diamond Key Metallic Temporary tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the last train isn't for an hour yet and I've got one story left in me, and it's about the arrows. You'll have seen them on the departures board at Harrowgate, black and pointing every way at once. Old Alf in the signal box used to say they were never meant to tell you where to go. They were meant to tell you where you'd been.

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Back in the winter of nineteen fifty-one, a porter called Nell Brackley found a brass key in the lost property tin, its teeth worn smooth, a little diamond stamped on the bow. Nobody claimed it. The tag said Platform Four, left luggage, and nothing more. She threaded it onto a ribbon and wore it at her wrist, and where the ribbon rubbed, gold leaf from the parcel labels flaked off and settled on her knuckles in small chevrons, like the feathers of a bird that couldn't decide between flying and staying.

Every evening she followed the arrows painted on the pillars: up the stairs, under the iron footbridge, past the tea urn that always hissed like it had something to say. They led to a bench where a man in a grey coat sat with a suitcase he never opened. She gave him the key. He turned it, and the case held nothing but a single black gem, polished like a drop of ink, and a pencilled note that read: Keep going, the line is longer than the platform.

Nell still works the Harrowgate night shift, they say, gold dust on her wrists. When a passenger asks which way, she doesn't point. She just taps the key against the board, the little diamond catches the lamplight, and off they go. Mostly they don't come back, which is the whole trick of a railway station, isn't it?