Two matching fine line black tattoos of an arrow with leaf-like fletching and a curved bow line, shown on the inner upper arms.

Matching fine line arrow tattoos on upper arms

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Two arms are shown side by side, each with a mirrored arrow tattoo. The arrow has a thin triangular head, a shaft and feather-like fletching made of leaf shapes, with a single curved line behind it. The linework is delicate and even, in black ink with no shading, and the two designs sit at a similar angle against plain skin and a dark textured background.

Fine line Upper arm Arrow Feather Leaf Curve Triangle Matching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tiller kicks under your hand the moment the lock gates groan shut behind you, and Mam is already shouting from the towpath that the water is low past Hythe Bridge and you are not to try the shallows on your own. You try them anyway. The narrowboat's bow noses into the reeds, the stern swings like a gate on a loose hinge, and for a long breath you are steering nothing but the smell of wet cut grass.

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Bett would have known what to do. She always knew which way the current wanted you, the way she could read a sky or a dog. In the spring, the summer before she went down to the city, the two of you sat at the kitchen table while the man with the lamp drew the same arrow onto each of your skins. Willow leaves for fletching, a thin triangle for the head, one curved line trailing behind like a wake. Mirror images, so that when you held them side by side the points faced the same way, toward open water and whatever lay past it.

Halfway up the long pound, with the willows thinning and a heron lifting off the bank, you finally work out the trick of it. You stop watching the channel and watch the curve instead, the line that bends back behind the head of the arrow, and you ease the tiller until the boat follows it. The bow comes round. The reeds let go. Ahead the canal runs straight and bright toward Gloucester, and you hold the course and do not look back at the bank where she waved.

The shaft points forward, Bett used to say, and the curve is only the part of you that keeps looking back. You let it trail. The boat goes on.