Black and grey fine line tattoo of a skull on an upright arrow with overlapping circles and a small flower, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and arrow with circles on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A fine line tattoo of a skull sits on a vertical arrow, with a feathered arrowhead at the top and a small flower at the base. Thin overlapping circles and straight construction lines surround the skull and arrow, with light stippled shading on the skull. The design is in black ink and greys against pale skin, centred on a dark background.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Skull Arrow Circle Flower Feather Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The surveyors of Tall Harrow had a rule that no one charted a moon without first drawing its orbit by hand. Wenna Marrick, who was sixteen and impatient, drew hers with a brass compass and a ruler her grandmother had carried from the old station at Cold Mere. She drew the rings one over another until the paper looked like a pond after rain.

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At the centre of the rings she set the arrow, a sighting rod with a feathered vane at its tip so the wind could tell her which way to lean. Under the vane she fixed a little skull, bone-white, that the crew used to carry in their coats. Her grandmother said it was not for fear. It was there so the person measuring would remember that the dead had measured too, had got some of the sums wrong, and had been forgiven.

Wenna wanted to chart the outer ring, the one nobody had walked. The elders said it could not be done in a single season. She went out anyway with the rod on her shoulder and the skull ticking against the brass at every step. At the edge of the ring the ground dropped into a field of grey flowers that opened only in the shadow of the rings, and she laid the rod down across them so the vane pointed back toward home.

When the crew came for her at dusk they found the arrow standing upright in the dust, feather to the stars, with a flower pressed flat beneath its foot. Her line ran true to the edge of the ring and stopped there. Nobody has walked past it since, though the children still take the rod out each spring and sight along it, and say they can see a girl standing at the far end, holding the compass steady.