Flash sheet of six black ink arrow designs with ornate filigree shafts, several topped with eight-point star motifs, drawn on pale paper.

Row of ornate arrows and star designs

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A row of six vertical arrow designs on a pale background, each with a decorative arrowhead, a filigree or star motif near the middle of the shaft, and a feathered or scrolled fletching at the base. Linework is fine and engraved-looking, with dense hatching in the star points and open scrollwork in the ornaments. The image is entirely black ink on paper, with no body or skin visible.

Geometric Arrow Star Compass rose Filigree Scroll Spear Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart room at Harrowgate Quay smelled of lamp oil and wet wool, and Mabel Sorrel had been pinning the same six arrows to the wall for three weeks before the harbour master noticed. They were not arrows, she told him, but bearings. Each shaft pointed the way a ship had gone out and the star at its middle was where she had found it again. He said that was a sailor's superstition and she said it was surveying, and they agreed to disagree over tea that tasted of tin.

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The trouble came in March, when the Cormorant failed to return from the Skerries. Her chart had marked the reef with a fine scroll of ink, the kind the engravers in London used for the borders of royal maps, and the scroll had been drawn too tightly. Mabel sat up with a magnifying glass and a stub of pencil, tracing each filigree back to its source, until she saw that the fletching at the foot of the fifth arrow was not decoration at all. It was a sounding line, every loop a fathom, and the line pointed north-north-east, where the sea was quiet and deep.

She sent the lifeboat that way on the Tuesday. On the Thursday they brought the Cormorant's crew in from a sandbank no chart had ever shown, cold and cursing and alive. Mabel did not take the chart down afterwards. She left the six arrows on the wall, and when the new apprentice asked why the stars were so heavily hatched, she only said that a good bearing needs a little more ink than a pretty one.