A kraft packet labelled TATTOOS shows a sheet of hand-drawn arrow designs in black with pink, mint and yellow-green accents.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hand-drawn arrow designs on a tattoo sheet packet

Mixed · Flash

A kraft card packet labelled TATTOOS displays a sheet of temporary tattoo designs. The arrows are drawn in black ink with even, simple linework, and several have pink, mint or yellow-green fills, along with chevron, dotted and patterned shafts. The arrows sit in vertical columns on a white background inside the packaging window.

Arrow Feather Chevron

Find an artist for this

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

The sheet cost sixpence from Mr Pidgeon's tray beside the cloakroom at the Starlight Ballroom, and most of the girls thought them too childish for dancing. Eight arrows in black ink, three with pink or mint fletching, one with a yellow-green band and a shaft striped like a row of tiny tents. I kept the card behind the ticket tin, under the spare pennies, and every Saturday when the band struck up Moonlight Bay I counted the stubs and glanced at the arrows pointing down at the parquet.

Keep reading

Terry Hollis bought the packet in April. He licked the back of a pink feathered arrow, pressed it to the inside of his wrist and held it under the bulb by the door for a full minute, counting out loud like a man timing an egg. When he peeled it away the shaft had come up pale and clean. He said it pointed the way he was going, and he meant the gate to the docks, where his papers had come through for the Navy that Monday.

He went out on the third Saturday in May. Next morning I found the sheet left on the counter, the dotted arrow gone, a small white gap in the column like a missing tooth. The rest still pointed down at the floorboards in their neat rows, and I could not stop thinking that every one of them was aimed at the door.