Black ink line drawing of a row of arrows pointing in different directions with a curved arch in the centre, a simple flash-style tattoo design on a white background with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Row of arrows and arch design

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a horizontal row of five black ink symbols on a plain white background: two downward arrows at the ends, an upward arrow at the right, a cross or T-shaped mark, and a curved arch with an arrowhead at its left end. The strokes are bold and brush-like with tapered ends, and there is no shading. The design is in black only and is centred with generous white space around it, with no skin visible.

Arrow Arch Cross Design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The arrows on the floor of Ward Seven were Ray's doing, not the trust's. He painted them the summer before he retired, a tin of white gloss and a brush he kept in his locker, pointing visitors away from the lifts that didn't go up any more. At ten past three I was following them with a linen trolley that squeaked on the left wheel, and I still hadn't got used to how the east corridor bent.

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Ray had a rule about the cross. Every route that passed the chapel doorway got one, a plain T with its upright a little too long, so agency nurses would look up and stop walking into the wrong wing. He said people walk faster when they know where they're going, but slower when they're frightened, and a cross gives frightened people something to hold onto. The arch at the bend was for the lift lobby, where the ceiling dropped and folk forgot to duck.

Halfway along the east corridor I found Mrs Okafor's son asleep upright on a plastic chair, his coat over his knees, a paper cup going cold beside him. His mother had been moved to a side room an hour earlier and nobody had thought to tell him. I didn't know what to say, so I pointed at the floor, the downward arrow, then the upward one at the lift that worked. He laughed, a short tired sound, and said Ray would have sent him the wrong way on purpose.

I walked him as far as the bend. Ray's last arrow there pointed back the way we'd come, which he always said was the only honest direction in a hospital. The boy followed it anyway, and when I turned the trolley round, the paint was still bright under the fluorescent light.