Fine line black ink mountain range above a bold arrow symbol on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Mountain outline and arrow symbol on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo on the inner wrist shows a thin, single-line outline of a mountain range across the top. Below it sits a solid black arrow-like symbol with a thick, even stroke. The piece is rendered in black ink only, against pale skin in a soft, evenly lit black and white photograph.

Fine line Forearm Mountain Arrow Symbol Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Edda had been clearing bindweed from the bottom terrace since breakfast, and the sun had only just cleared the ridge when her spade turned up the sign. It was a flat iron arrow no longer than her hand, pitted with rust, its shaft bent so it pointed straight up the slope. Above the wall the mountains stood in a ragged line, grey against a white sky, and she had never once thought of them as pointing anywhere.

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Her grandfather had kept this garden before her. He had kept a tin of pencils, a ledger of frost dates and a habit of walking the top path at dusk with his hands behind his back. She remembered him saying the arrow had been nailed to the gate post when he came, and that when the post rotted the arrow had dropped into the border like a coin nobody wanted. She turned it over in her palm. On the back someone had scratched a tally of seven short strokes and one long one.

She carried it up the path that evening, past the greenhouse and the sheep wire, to where the wall gave out and the bracken began. The climb took her an hour. At the top the mountains looked closer and smaller at once, and there, set into a cairn of loose stones, was a second arrow, rusted the same, pointing down towards the valley, the garden and the kitchen light she had left burning.

She stood a long while with the two signs in her hands. Then she went back down and pushed the first arrow into the soil where the tomatoes would go next spring, point to the sky, so that whoever came up the terrace would have to look up to find the way.