Two forearms, each with a black linework arrow tattoo pointing left, shown side by side on light skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching arrow tattoos on forearms

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms are shown side by side, each with a single arrow tattoo in black ink. The arrows have a simple outlined shaft, a pointed head and feathered fletching, and point towards the left. The background is a blurred blue surface, and a hand with bracelets is partly visible at the lower right.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hanne Corran made bows in the harbour town of Skelbeck for forty years, and when her grandsons Tobias and Amos went to sea on the herring boat Marigold, she gave each of them an arrow cut from the same length of ash. The fletching was grey gull feather. "An arrow is only as true as the hand that lets it go," she said, and then she made them promise to keep the point turned toward home.

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They were gone a full season before the ink was fresh. Tobias had his arrow put on the inside of his forearm by a man in Hull who charged him a shilling and a pint. Amos copied it the next week, and the two of them compared their marks over the rail, both pointing left, the way the coast lay. In the autumn gale that broke the nets off Flamborough, the Marigold was driven south with her mast gone, and nobody aboard could tell which way was north.

Tobias said the ship would come round if he turned his arm, so he held it out in the rain, wrist up, until the point steadied. Amos did the same on the quay, staring at water he could not see, and the two marks lined up like a sight on a bow. The boat came round the Scar at first light with her crew all alive.

Hanne never saw her grandsons' arms again, for her eyes had gone that winter. She asked them to hold their wrists out anyway, and she ran her thumb along each line, feeling for the feathers. "Good," she said. "Now you've got the aim of it."

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